Fostering food safety culture in food service organizations: the synergistic role of spirituality and safety climate.

Food safety remains a global public health challenge, yet traditional compliance-driven approaches often struggle to sustain genuine and consistent behavioral change. This perspective article examines the potential and limitations of integrating spirituality-across individual, workplace, and organizational levels-as a complementary force within food safety culture. Grounded in spiritual leadership theory and safety climate frameworks, we propose that spirituality may enhance food safety climate by fostering value alignment, ethical sensemaking, and shared responsibility. However, we acknowledge the conceptual and practical tensions inherent in applying spiritual constructs within often secular, highly regulated food safety systems-including measurement challenges, cultural and religious diversity, and the need for universally acceptable, evidence-based interventions. Notwithstanding these complexities, we argue that such integration warrants scholarly and practical exploration, particularly in an era marked by post-pandemic distrust, supply chain fragility, and regulatory fatigue. By synthesizing insights from organizational psychology, behavioral economics, and public health, this article advances a propositional thesis: that spirituality, if thoughtfully operationalized, could serve as a contributing factor in rebuilding trust, enhancing procedural integrity, and cultivating a more resilient and purpose-aware food safety culture. We conclude with a strategic agenda for future research and policy, calling for empirical validation, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and culturally adaptive approaches.