Food Incident Interactive Training Tool: A Serious Game for Food Incident Management

Food incidents, such as the horse meat scandal in 2013 and the E. coli outbreak in 2011, will always occur. Food business operators (FBOs) must be prepared when responding to such situations not only to protect their businesses, but more importantly to protect the consumers. The Food Standards Agency of United Kingdom has recommended that FBOs should not only have a response plan in place, but they should also have to consistently train and practice implementing these plans to effectively address and minimize the impact of food incidents. Traditional training exercises, such as tabletop or mock simulations, could entail considerable costs. While large companies may have the resources for these activities, smaller companies may not be in the same position. In this chapter we describe the development of a more accessible training tool for managing food incidents. The tool, which takes the form of a simple online serious game, called the Food Incident Interactive Training Tool, is co-designed with domain experts and stakeholders in the UK food industry. It engages players, specifically FBOs, in interactive simulations of food incidents, in which their decisions and actions within the game impact how the simulation unfolds. At the end of this study, we aim to determine the efficacy of the serious game in fulfilling its purpose, given the collaborative nature of the design process, as well as the simplicity of the end product.