Management Commitment as a Deterrent of Adopting Food Safety Management Systems by Public Universities Catering Facilities in The Mount Kenya and Aberdare Regional Bloc

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

99 1 to facilitate adoption of food safety management systems.