Life Lessons with Lone Jespersen, Ph.D.

Article By Amanda Joerndt Published May 27, 2025
Article Source: https://www.qualityassurancemag.com/article/lone-jespersen/

Jespersen, founder and principal of Cultivate SA, shares her global mission to help companies adopt a robust food safety culture.

Lone Jespersen, Ph.D., has learned firsthand the importance of food safety over the course of her 20-year career. The founder and principal of Cultivate SA, an organization dedicated to eradicating foodborne illness by working with companies to transform their food safety culture, grew up in the automobile industry and was an engineer at Woodbridge Foam before food safety piqued her interest.

After moving to Canada in 2000, Jespersen, who was born in Denmark and also called Ireland and Austria home before settling in Switzerland, learned about Maple Leaf Foods and began working there as a Six Sigma Black Belt, a role focused on leading continuous improvement initiatives. There, Jespersen found herself on the frontline of a 2008 meat recall due to Listeria contamination that killed 23. Resulting from that tragedy was Jespersen's passion for implementing food safety strategies across 47 Maple Leaf plants.

“It’s very personal for me because of the recall we went through and the families that were impacted by our mistakes,” Jespersen said. “When we moved back to Europe, I had to ask myself if I wanted a similar job, or do I want to take everything that was gifted to me through that terrible event and try and help more people with it? I decided on the latter.”

Cultivate SA was founded in 2015 as a one-woman band but quickly expanded to eight core team members based around the world, meeting customers wherever they’re located on their unique journeys to building a strong food safety culture.

“We have the mission of eradicating foodborne illness one culture at a time,” Jespersen said. “We have three maturity models at the center of the mission, and what it looks like if a regulator, retailer or manufacturer has a strong or immature food safety culture. The maturity model helps clients in each of those sectors find where their biggest culture gap is and what we should prioritize to change that.”

Jespersen holds a doctorate in culture-enabled food safety from the University of Guelph, Canada, and serves on boards for the International Food Protection Training Institute and STOP Foodborne Illness.

Here, she shares more with QA about her global mission to help companies adopt a robust food safety culture:

I was originally a processing engineer. Food safety was not in my blood when I first started.

I was pretty sure I had most of the answers to everything as an early engineer, and then I joined an organization like Maple Leaf that was very good at giving feedback. I was learning how to influence culture and getting people to come along with us to make these changes.

What we discovered was we did not do enough at Maple Leaf to have people understand and bring food safety along with them into decision-making in different departments, like maintenance, human resources and finance.

We changed our systems and, more importantly, put most of our efforts into culture. We ran, over the course of three months, about 34 senior leadership courses, because we had to elevate the level of understanding so significantly. We changed how we measured food safety as well.

At Cultivate SA, we have developed three maturity models. One has been scientifically validated in peer- reviewed papers, and the other two are in progress. Once we are done with the assessments, we also have the expertise to help companies change their culture. We do workshops with them and help them identify actions to help them close the culture gap.

Our culture of food safety is one of transparency. We are blessed with eight people from different parts of the world with different backgrounds, and it’s a very diverse team. With that, everyone has to figure out how to be transparent with each other. Since we started in 2015, it was really for me to set the tone of the culture.

We have a partnership with the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, and I am a visiting professor there. The research we are working on is to demonstrate predictability — so if you do this, you can expect this impact on your culture. If you decided to run a number of sessions where you educate leaders on behaving in a certain way, you can see a predicable outcome in your food safety.

You can look at food safety as being compliant or as a topic that is critical for your business to grow and improve. I would say nine out of 10 companies treat food safety as a compliance issue. Do you pass audits? If so, you put it away, and you’re happy. The biggest challenge we are facing is how do we move out of that into a mindset where food safety enables business growth and improvement?