Global Glove Safety Day

The 18th of September marks the third annual Global Glove Safety Day, an opportunity to focus attention on an often overlooked part of food safety: the food handling glove.

Global Glove Safety Day is led by Eagle Protect in partnership with food safety advocate Dr. Darin Detwiler. After losing his 16-month-old son, Riley, to an E. coli infection in 1993, Darin has become one of the world’s most respected food safety advocates, advising the USDA and FDA, authoring books, and educating future leaders in food regulation. He also appears in the Emmy Award–winning documentary Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food.

The Best Food Safety Headline Is The One We Prevent This year’s message is about the underestimated value of prevention. Prevention starts with what we know, rather than assume, about the quality, use and verification of the gloves that touch our food. For New Zealand’s food and beverage industry, where food safety is fundamental to protecting consumers, maintaining trust and supporting our reputation as a food-producing nation & exporter, the decisions made around food handling gloves matter.

The Danger of Assumptions

“We assume gloves protect us. But assumptions don’t stop pathogens. Standards do.”
— Dr. Darin Detwiler

A new glove is often assumed to be clean, but new does not necessarily mean clean, and food contact does not automatically mean contamination-free.

How a glove is manufactured, its quality, how it is used and when it is changed all matter. Where these things can be verified, we shouldn’t have to rely on assumptions.

Food Safety Is In Our Hands

Food safety is built on everyday decisions.

1. Choose gloves based on more than price. 

2. Ask suppliers for evidence of quality and cleanliness. 

3. Make sure gloves are used and changed correctly. 

4. And never assume that a new glove is automatically a clean glove.

Small decisions like these are where prevention starts.

Make Prevention Visible

Consumers may never see the contamination stopped before it left a food production facility, the glove changed at the right moment, or the manager who chose glove verification and safety over cost.

But those unseen decisions are what protect people and build trust.

This Global Glove Safety Day, make prevention visible.

Ask better questions. Expect evidence. Look at how gloves are selected, verified and used.

Because the best food safety headline is still the one we prevent.

Put Best Practice Into Practice Good glove decisions shouldn’t be left to assumption. Our free Glove Best Practices Guide gives food safety, QA and procurement teams practical guidance on selecting, using and managing gloves with food safety in mind. Download the Glove Best Practices Guide, a practical resource to support your food safety programme.