In the food industry, handwashing is essential to ensure food safety and reduce the risk of foodborne illness to consumers. Proper hand hygiene technique and adherence to company policy is a proven way to reduce cross-contamination and the transmission of harmful germs from hands.
Yet, despite good facilities, posters, and regular training, failure of food handling staff to wash their hands effectively remains widespread across all food sectors — contributing to customer illness. Even so, handwashing is a legal requirement.
This post examines why traditional food safety training hasn’t solved the problem — and why hand hygiene compliance gaps still exist today. We need to understand these barriers if we are to find ways to improve hand hygiene practice and make food safer for customers.
Table of Contents
Cost of Poor Hand Hygiene Non-Compliance in The Food Industry
The Food Standards Agency (2022) estimates there are around 2.4 million cases of foodborne illness in the UK each year. Approximately 180 deaths a year are linked to foodborne diseases (Holland et al. 2020). This includes 380,000 cases of norovirus associated with food.
Poor hand hygiene is not just a health risk—it’s a financial one. The Food Standards Agency estimates that foodborne illness costs the UK economy around £9 billion each year, with hand hygiene failures a major contributing factor.
Poor Hand Hygiene Practice Of Food Workers
Time and again, researchers observe poor handwashing habits of food handlers in food production and food service settings that fall short. These are not just missed opportunities, but ineffective handwashing technique – even when staff do make it to the sink. Food handlers’ hands can and do harbour bacteria and viruses capable of making customers ill. This includes pathogenic bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella, Listeria, or E. coli and viruses like norovirus infection.
Staff behave better when they know they’re being watched — a classic case of the Hawthorne effect. So, when inspectors or managers are on the floor, hand hygiene compliance shoots up and drops as soon as no-one is watching.
Food handlers in the food service sector (e.g. restaurants) account for the highest percentage (around 40%) of preventable outbreaks of infection in developed countries. Therefore understanding the reasons for poor hand hygiene compliance is of great significance for reducing the incidence of foodborne illness.
Root Causes Of Poor Handwashing Non-Compliance By Food Handling Staff
Poor hand hygiene is rarely down to ignorance. A 2020 review identifies a cluster of behavioural and cultural drivers that consistently predict poor hand hygiene practice. These include:
🔷 Social Influences (norms and peer behaviour). Staff copy what the team does. If the usual practice is to skip handwashing to keep pace, individuals will follow the way things are done.
🔷 Managerial Signals & Weak Workplace Culture. Where managers reward speed over food safety, or don’t visibly enforce hand hygiene, safe behaviour will not be prioritised. Food safety culture — not PowerPoint training slides — shapes everyday practice.
🔷 Competing Tasks & Time Pressure. Workers routinely juggle multiple tasks, and when time is tight they prioritise service speed over stopping to wash hands. Competing job tasks are a predictable constraint on safe behaviour.
🔷 Glove Misuse & False Security. Changing gloves without washing hands, or using gloves as a substitute for handwashing, is a common practice that creates a false sense of protection.
🔷 Infrastructure & Re‑Contamination Risks. Broken sinks, distant handwashing facilities, faulty dryers, or contaminated exit handles (door plates) can make washing inconvenient or immediately futile. Staff can re‑contaminate their hands as they leave a restroom. These structural barriers are practical and observable.
🔷 Language and Literacy Limits. Written training or long technical slides won’t reach everyone. Many teams include staff for whom English is not a first language — and no one wants to admit they don’t understand.
🔷 Tick‑Box Culture. Training certificates look good in a file, but they don’t ensure safe food handling. Observed behaviours and immediate corrective feedback from supervisors or managers matter far more.
These factors combine to shape everyday hand hygiene — with variables intertwined.
Why Knowledge Only Hand Hygiene Training Fails
Food handlers can prevent foodborne illness when they have the necessary knowledge to handle food hygienically. However, knowledge alone is not sufficient to change poor hand hygiene behaviour. According to a review by Lee et al. 2022, the following factors matter:
Characteristics Of The Food Handler: Their experience, beliefs about the consequences, attitude towards hand hygiene, perception of risk, self-efficacy (belief in ones own ability), optimistic bias (over-confidence in ones own knowledge and skills), and motivation and intention to comply.
Demographic Factors: Longer work experience and higher levels of education are associated with improved food handling practices. The size of the food business is important too. The financial constraints of a small-sized company can lead to greater risk-taking decisions which can in turn lead to poor hygiene. Larger businesses may place a greater emphasis on hygiene training and supervision.
Organisational Factors: play a significant role in hygiene practices, especially the management system, the roles of coworkers or supervisors in supporting hygiene practices in the workplace and the food safety culture. Social norms, environmental constraints, managerial follow-through and the day-to-day pressures, such as time barriers, prevent knowledge from becoming routine action.
Achieving hand hygiene compliance through personal hygiene and kitchen practices cannot be achieved by training alone. To achieve sustainable behaviour change we need to address multiple barriers to encourage staff to wash their hands effectively.
Structural And Practical Barriers To Hand Hygiene Behaviour
The physical environment (an organisational factor) is known to make handwashing easier — or a daily struggle. Handwash sinks in awkward locations, lack of hot water, soap and disposable towels — are major structural barriers that prevent hand hygiene compliance. So if your staff do not have easy access to hand washing facilities, they’re more likely to cut corners and workaround procedures no matter how well-trained they are.
Cultural and structural barriers often act like invisible holes in your food safety defences — a concept explained in our post about the Swiss cheese model in food safety.
Although infrastructure matters — so too does maintenance, monitoring, managerial feedback and staff being able to speak-up to report problems and concerns.
Put simply: you can teach the steps of handwashing, but if the culture and/or the environment doesn’t support good hand hygiene practice, it won’t translate – non-compliance will prevail.
Implications For Safe Food Hygiene Practice
For inspection-readiness and genuine risk reduction, it’s not enough to provide staff with food hygiene training and file away their certificates. You need to understand why staff don’t wash their hands. Only by addressing multiple barriers – including cultural and structural constraints – can we translate knowledge into action.
Hand hygiene is one of the most critical links in controlling infection in food production and food service environments.When we talk about breaking the chain of infection, we are referring to interrupting the steps by which pathogens can move from person to person, or from person to food, and ultimately to your customers. For a deeper dive into how each link in the chain works — and exactly how to break these links in your business — read our dedicated post: How to Break the Chain of Infection in Food Safety.
What’s Next?
Knowledge alone will not change the handwashing behaviour of food handlers. In a follow up post we’ll break down the interventions that actually work, including how visual feedback (like UV training) can highlight unseen hygiene gaps and help build lasting habits.
If you are interested in making your food safety system safer, read about how to prevent system drift.
Dr Julie Rasmussen
Related Reading
References
FSA (2022) [accessed on29.9.25 from: https://www.food.gov.uk/news-alerts/news/fsa-research-suggests-new-higher-estimates-for-the-role-of-food-in-uk-illness].
Holland D, Thomson L, Mahmoudzadeh N, Khaled A. Estimating deaths from foodborne disease in the UK for 11 key pathogens. BMJ Open Gastroenterology. 2020;7:e000377.
Lee et al. (2022). An Integrative Review of Hygiene Practice Studies in the Food Service Sector. Journal of Food Protection, Volume 83, Issue 12, December 2020, Pages 2147-2157.
G., Payne, J. Payne. The Hawthorne effect. Key concepts in social research, Sage Publications, London (2004), pp. 107-111.