Abstract:
The general public requires an assurance that the food they are consuming is safe and
free from contamination which can be attained through taking adequate food safety
measures and adopting food safety management systems that are well documented,
uniformly followed and verifiable. However various constraints among them
management commitment have led organizations especially public universities catering
facilities fail to adapt these systems. The objective of this study therefore was to analyse
management commitment as a deterrent of adopting food safety management systems
by public universities catering facilities in the Mount Kenya and Aberdare regional bloc.
Based on the theory of constraint, a cross sectional survey, on a population of 11 public
universities catering facilities in the bloc were purposively sampled whereby 187
catering staff on permanent terms of service were enumerated through census.
Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the instrument was 0.79 which was above the
minimum thresh hold 0.7 for a reliability hence verifying that the instrument could be
relied upon during data collection process. It was administered on the food handlers
resulting to a response rate of 80.7% which was excellent. Descriptive and Inferential
analysis was carried out using Statistical package for social sciences version 26. The
findings on demographics revealed that majority (56.3 %) of staff working in the
facilities were females and that 33.1 % of total staff were diploma holders. Inferential
statistics on Correlation analysis revealed that there was a moderate positive association
between management commitment and adoption (r 0.590 P-value 0.000≤0.005) and
simple linear regression done revealed that 34.8% of the variations in adoption was
caused by management commitment leading to a conclusion that management
commitment significantly deterred adoption of FSMSs with (β
=0.493, t=8.924 and Pvalue=000≤0.05)
in the public universities catering facilities in the Mont Kenya and
Aberdare regional bloc, It is recommended that management show commitment by
providing food safety policies, provide financial resources and coach food safety teams
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to facilitate adoption of food safety management systems.
