Matt Stinchfield The Brewery Safety Consultant

Ever wonder how a brewery maintains safety among hops, grains, and large equipment? Join us on this enlightening journey as we converse with Matt Stinchfield, a renowned safety guru in the brewery industry. With his rich background and extensive knowledge, Matt eloquently illustrates the significance of behavioral and systems safety in the workplace. He offers valuable insights into his work with the Brewer's Association and gives us a sneak peek into his book, Brewery Safety. We forge ahead to explore the intricate world of safety enforcement in breweries, the role insurance companies play, and the regulatory framework that secures a robust safety culture.

But wait, there's more! We switch gears to sit down with Jerry, a beer connoisseur and judge with a knack for puns. Jerry shares his captivating journey in beer judging, elaborating on the art of sensory evaluation, and his unending passion for puns. Not just that, Jerry is ready to connect with you! Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments at palatejack@gmail.com. As we wrap up this episode, we leave you with a warm Thanksgiving message, underlining the weight of staying safe and hygiene conscious. Whether you're a beer lover or intrigued by workplace safety, this episode is a treasure trove of knowledge and fascinating tales from the industry.

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Hospitality Cleaning 101
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Transcript

Matt Stinchfield Safety Brewery Consultant

Jerry

 Welcome to Cleaning Processes with Jerry. My podcast is dedicated to building an online community of like-minded individuals and businesses in the chemical and cleaning industry and actually any industry. We're going to share some ideas, some tips, solutions, and tell some stories to hopefully solve problems and even expand our markets. Please join me every other week where infrequently we're going to have a special guest that just couldn't be you. We are considering starting up a Facebook group soon and would love your opinion. So please send me an email. At the end of the show, I'll give you my contact information. I work for ChemStation of Boston as a Senior Sales Consultant servicing New England. I also have a blog at HospitalityCleaning101. If you ever have questions, feel free to reach out and I might answer on a future podcast if you like. Again, at the show's end, I will include my contact information. Today, we have Matt Stinchfield. I didn't pronounce that correct. Matt, thanks for joining us here today. Can you pronounce your last name? I'm messing up twice now. Sure, Jerry. It's Stinchfield.

Matt Stinchfield. 

I was close. I was close, you know, but a name like that, you know, you can imagine kids ribbed me at the bus stop.

Jerry

Yeah, I can imagine. So, and the reason I'm laughing as we, without being sick a couple of weeks ago and some problems with zoom, I shouldn't even blame it on zoom. We'll blame it on me. So let's go ahead and start Matt. Thanks for joining today, Matt. So I don't. put my foot in my mouth anymore today. Go ahead, tell us a little bit about yourself and the different titles that you own in the brewery industry and outside the brewery industry.

Matt Stinchfield

Well, let's see. I mean, in a nutshell, I'm a career health and safety person. I've been doing occupational safety since my early twenties. I started working in environmental chemistry and laboratories and got sort of hard lessons there on safety, just working around all the dangerous lab opportunities. And then I found an interest in doing hazardous waste remediation, worked on Superfund sites and radioactive uranium mill sites. cleaning those things up. And then in the nineties, uh, I met a gentleman named Peter Whalen, who was one of the first people to start insuring breweries with special coverages that are appropriate for that line of work, uh, which he still does. He does a great job at it. Uh, Whalen insurance. And I met him at a trade show in Phoenix in 1997. And we were chatting because we both came from Massachusetts and he said, uh, Uh, why don't you take your occupational safety expertise and apply it to breweries? And, uh, it was a great idea. And so I started doing that. Uh, I then became a commercial brewer, uh, continued in my work in environmental health and safety, and then owned a brewery about 10 years ago and have been really focusing on the safety aspects of beverage manufacturing for the last 30 years. So I guess that's a starter.

Jerry

Well, I first had met you and it wasn't in person. I had seen you online. It might've been during COVID, before COVID. You're really involved with the Brewer's Associations and with safety with inside breweries. You run many different programs, correct?

 Matt Stinchfield

Right. So in 2013, they started the safety subcommittee at the Brewer's Association. And I was chair of that for four years. I continue to sit on that. a committee now 11 years on, and from 2015 to 2022, I was the Brewers Association Safety Ambassador. uh, sort of a Johnny Appleseed of safety going around to brewers guilds around the country and encouraging people to, you know, to do what they could to improve the safety, safe working conditions, and also mental health of the workforce. And since that time, uh, I have just finished a book called Brewery Safety, and it's the only book of its kind, as far as I know, uh, worldwide. And, you know, I fill my days right now with doing safety coaching for breweries and helping other people launch projects and doing it safely.

Jerry

And I've seen it, I have not read it. Now I know that through watching some of the YouTube videos that I've seen you on, and I will do show notes at the end of this show and in my writing and put different sites where people can watch some of this. I'm gonna say you go outside the lane a little bit with safety where you involve the people a whole lot more. It's much more than just looking for hoses, wet floors and stuff like that. It comes down to what might not be the correct word, but behavior.Am I correct?

Matt Stinchfield

Yeah, it has a lot to do with behavior. And, you know, in safety, there are two schools of thought. There is one which is accidents and injuries are behavior related. And the other one is accidents and injuries are a system failure where some system that the employer put into place or is required to put into place didn't get put into place well, and it didn't, on sort of an autopilot philosophy, maintain safety for the workers. So, you know, I just don't, whenever I see something, it's like, it's either black or it's white, or you have to say this way or that way. I generally try to find out what is in the middle of all of that. Because when you're on the extremes, you can't get anywhere. You can't move. You're stuck up against a wall. If you only believe in behavioral safety or you only believe in systems safety. So my view is it's both. You know, the employer has responsibilities. They have compliance responsibilities. In the very, very fundamental language of OSHA, the employer has the responsibility to create a safe and healthful workplace, period. That's in the law. That actually predates the regulations that came out in 1970. And I like to go back and look at the law sometimes to find out what were people really thinking when they created OSHA, and that's what they were thinking. The employer has a responsibility to create a safe workplace. But there's another paragraph right underneath that that says the employee has to wear protective equipment as issued, has to abide by the ways that they're trained to do things safely, has to follow all the regulations of OSHA. And so it is not just, you know, again, it's not a two-sided thing. It's either the employer or the employee. It's both. And it takes both. And so, well, let me tell you a story, Jerry. Years ago, I was at a wedding and the photographer had a one beat up old camera in his fist. And in the other hand, he had a little wooden crate with a handhold in it, and he could just carry that around and he could drop the crate down and stand up on it to get a better shot. And that was his whole thing, a box and a beat up old camera. And I said to him, hey, you know, is that all you've got? And I didn't mess him up at all. He just said he said, you know, I learned to take pictures a long time ago. Getting great pictures is all about the people. Wow. And not the equipment. And that really stuck with me. And I think the same is true for safety. People stay safe for three mechanisms for staying safe. They watch out for themselves, right? They see something, they perceive risk, they go, yeah, if I put my hand in that boiling hot liquid, that's going to be bad. So I'm not gonna do that. That's the easy one. The next one that they do is they say, somebody is supposed to look out for me. The employer has to demonstrate that they've got safety on their mind. They need to be buying safety equipment and supplies. They need to be making sure that the people around me are being safe, right? And so that, you know, you have your responsibility and then you have everybody else's responsible for me, right? They're responsible for taking care of me. And if I have those two things, I'm supposed to be safe. I mean, we believe that. But there's a third thing and one that we miss a lot is my peer watching out for me. Not because of a regulation which says to do so, but because they know that when they do that, we have a contract, we have an unspoken contract that I'm watching out for them too. Right. And, and, and so that's the behavior stuff. That's the people stuff. And in businesses where I go in, I can almost like feel safety, like a breeze in the wind, you know, it's like, wow, it's really safety in here. I get it. I see what's going on. I don't know what it is yet. I haven't put my finger on it, but you know, it feels good. And oftentimes that's where those cultures, the workplace cultures have evolved to a point where people really look out for each other. It's a really kind thing to do. It's a good human thing to do. You know, besides all the reasons for safety, which we can say, you know, it ends up costing the company less money in the long run. Fewer people are injured. Production is better. Quality is better. You know, we can say lots of things about safety, but at the end of the day, how does it leave you feeling?

Jerry

Who calls you to go into a brewery? Is it the brewery ownership? Could it possibly be an insurance company? How do you get contacted? What motivates you to go into the brewery? Are they calling you or does frequently an insurance company call you to help people keep their premiums down and such?

Matt Stinchfield

 Well, I do it both ways. I mean, I certainly started in this, you know, applying safety to breweries based on doing loss control for insurers. Right. And, and, you know, that certainly makes sense, but the insurance market has other motivators, other cost factors and motivators that also compel companies to do a good job, to be safe, or, you know, to make sure that they meet fire and electrical codes and, and those sorts of things. They don't need me for that in a sense that the insured is saying yes. Some people call me because they know me from the industry and they're planning on putting in a new system or they're trying to get a hold of a runaway safety culture. And, you know, they might think that it's a, they might think that they're calling me to ask me about, you know, how do we comply with this stuff, but with these regulations, with these rules. But again, I, I take a cultural viewpoint of it first. And I look at that and say, you know, what are the people equations here is management sending a message that they really are enthused about safety and their walk in the walk. And if they're not, then I have to start with management. And if I can't turn management around and there've been places where, to be quite honest, I've done an interview with a brewery employer and seen how dysfunctional their culture is and just, and just walked out because until management is going to show up, everything else is a waste of time. Right. You know, come in here and tell us what PPE to wear. Yeah. But you guys don't even have a company safety plan and you've got a hundred people here. And then you don't need people, you need a whole lot more than the right gloves.

Jerry

And I've seen, I'm not talking about breweries, but industries in a whole, they'll have a safety committee. But then if you ask the safety committee, How is management or ownership helping you? They're just meeting. They want to know about the PPE, but well, we're not buying it this month.

Matt Stinchfield

I mean, safety committees work when you have an established safety culture. But if you think safety committees are going to get you to safety culture, that's ass backwards and it doesn't usually work that way. Correct. So what, you know, the idea behind a safety committee or in a very small brewery, the idea behind saying, here's our head brewer. They went to Siebel. They must know more about safety than the rest of us. Let's put the safety hat on that person, you know, without realizing that person may not have the time, the wherewithal or the communication skills or the management mandate to get safety distributed across all employees. And so that's the existing paradigm of safety in small businesses. It's either one person's the safety go-to or a committee of people who are trying to share that load a little bit. But I look at everybody who's not on the safety committee and I'm going, why aren't you involved in your own well-being? And so again, that's the human factor and getting everybody there to the table and hearing what they have to say.

Jerry

 In a previous conversation you and I had, I get called in to help with a chemical safety, just a piece of the pie. And they'll have me come in and do an introduction, talk some generalities of different things, OSHA, how to read SDS, where the SDSs are held at. you know, that they have them on a wall, easy, accessible, not locked up in the owner's desk drawer, and you can only get there up to five o'clock and things like that. So we review those little things. And when they call me in, you can see, it doesn't take long to figure out why you're there. you know, do they really want to learn, do they really want to encompass the whole thing, or do they just want a checkmark that six people attended and, you know, we're done with that. So I always applaud anybody, and even when I don't feel that they're taking everything to heart, I at least applaud management and ownership for having me in. They're at least trying something because there I might ask somebody else and they're not even sure what I'm talking about. But I will say, and I know you do stuff outside of breweries, I do say that breweries are much better than some other organizations I've seen that or really fly by the seat of their pants. Let's just put it that way. They seem concerned. They're much more concerned because I think it comes out of the industry of they're doing a quality product. They're doing a product that can easily spoil. Something can happen to it. If the tanks aren't clean properly and stuff like that, because years ago, I did a lot of restaurants and some of the rush on, you know, I would never, I would never eat it, let's put it that way.

Matt Stinchfield

 I know, you had to scrub out your eyes for what you just saw.

Jerry

Yeah, yeah, you know what I'm trying to say, so. Yes. I like the brewery industry a lot better, let's put it that way.

Matt Stinchfield

 Well, you know, it is generally good. I think brewers have their hearts in the right place. They're a really, really good group of people by and large. And, you know, I will return to that with people and say, look, you know, you've got that going for yourselves and you also have what brewers are pretty good at is an oral tradition of safety. They say, this is how we do it here. You know, Oh, Hey, you know, I do it that way. It's a little bit better. Um, The shortcoming with that is it can be inconsistent and it ends up not getting written down. But if you have that culture, it's not a big stretch to improve it a little bit and make sure that you've got documentation of having done a hazard assessment and that that has resulted in an SOP that has safety stuff built into it as well as the procedural stuff. And that way people start to see safety not as an obligation, but as just another value like quality. You know, nobody's going to poo-poo quality and be serious about it. People shouldn't be poo-pooing safety, but they do because they view it as an obligation, as the man telling them what to do, so to speak, rather than as, this is the way to run a good business. This is the way to be kind to my coworkers and myself. You know, if you look at it that way, it becomes more of a value to you and you can just give up the fight. You know, don't fight against safety, adopt it and go with it like you would with quality or with sustainability or with good community relations with your customer base or any other business practice.

Jerry

 Right. Now, the book you've written, what motivated you to write the book? Were you approached by a different group? Had something you'd been thinking about for a long time?

Matt Stinchfield

 Well, I, it was a coming together of those things because I had been thinking about it. There was no book sitting on the safety subcommittee at the Brewers Association. People were often tendering us questions like, what are the general OSHA rules that I need to follow here for a brewery? And, you know, that's not an easy answer. It doesn't lend itself to an email. Let's say it needs a book and there was no book for it. And Brewer's Publications made it known that they were thinking about having somebody write the book. And, and I put in a proposal. I think other writers did as well. They selected me and, um, you know, it was quite a process. It's a, it's the biggest book that the Brewer's Publications puts out. Um, my chapter on physical safety was longer than a lot of books that they've published just on physical safety components. So they ended up breaking that into multiple chapters. How many pages? It's 267 pages. It's got some really, really helpful charts in it. At the end of every subject area is a little table saying these parts of OSHA might apply to you. So if you're trying to achieve that sort of documentary compliance, then the book's really good for that. But most of what it is, you know, here's the kind of hazard that comes with this activity. And here are the ways that you can mitigate, reduce the opportunity for those hazards. And then that way it's very practical. But there is a, there's a substantial chapter on brewery culture. There's one on KPIs, key performance indicators. You know, in safety, most of the KPIs are backward looking, like what was last year's accident and injury rate. Well, oh, that's too bad. That was last year, you know, but then you're asking yourself, how do we do better? How do we get, get a better next year? And so, uh, I think that chapter is rather novel in that it's got lists and lists of KPIs. Many of them are forward looking and they're all for safety improvements in safety programs and safety culture.

Jerry 

And then I understand you are even looking to write future books. Am I correct?

Outside of the brewery industry? 

Matt Stinchfield

Some of the projects that I'm working on right now are 101 toolbox talks for manufacturers, you know, so getting outside of beverage manufacturing, there, there are a lot of commonalities in any kind of manufacturing. I could do another 101 book on construction safety, and I could do one on, on service industries, you know, in hospitals and schools and, and, and retail establishments. So that's, that's part of it. And the fun one I'm working on is a book called How to Make Trees Fly, which is an all ages craft book on things that you can make with wooden paper that are fun to fly. Wow. Cause I can't sit still. There it is.

Jerry

Now, how much traveling are you doing now? You live in Vermont. You travel throughout the United States, correct?

Matt Stinchfield

Not not very much, because since the Brewers Association doesn't have the safety ambassador position anymore, which they subsidize through member dues. So now it falls to a guild to pay my expenses to travel. And so those those speaking engagements have have gone down. But, you know, I get with people in other ways. A lot of Zooms. Zoom meetings for sure, trying to hook up at, at, you know, the national conference, the craft brewers conference every year, which I've been at for, you know, 20 years and running. So.

Jerry

What's the biggest problem that you see in breweries with safety? I imagine that's a thousand dollar question, but I mean, what is the problem that you see the most or the one that you scratch your head on?

Matt Stinchfield

Well, you know, um. There are certainly a lot of things, the slips and trips in the wet areas and areas where there's a lot of stuff on the floor is a big one. Some breweries have managed to tame that beast better than others. Elevated surfaces and work platforms falling off of heights and things falling off of heights. You've got thermal hazards, you've got electrical hazards, and you've got pressure hazards. One of the things I do when I first look at a business is, is I go, what's the housekeeping like, you know, because that is kind of a litmus test on everything else. If housekeeping is good, then I see that there's a kind of an attention being paid to like, what are our walking and working surfaces? How are we stacking goods at height? Um, and those things generally, you know, reflect the safety mentality of the business. Look at housekeeping.

Jerry

That's great. So as we wrap this up about the book, where is the best place to purchase the book? Would it be the Brewers Association or Amazon?

Matt Stinchfield

 Well, you can get it on Amazon for sure. And you know, leave a review there or whatever, but a brewerspublications.com is the publishing arm of the Brewers Association. And if you use the code Matt 10, M-A-T-T and the number 10, you'll get, you'll save $13 there.

Jerry

 I will put that information again in the show notes. Someone just has to hit the link and go to it and, and, and put in the code number.

Matt Stinchfield

 We appreciate that. That's right. Just enter in the coupon code and that's, that's our thanks for being a listener to your podcast.

Jerry

Well, we appreciate you coming here today. I hope to. Do some edits and get this out. Well, of course, Thanksgiving's coming up, probably be after Thanksgiving, but I hope you and your family have a happy Thanksgiving and I appreciate you joining us here today. One last thing I will also put in here, which is the best email address you'd like people to reach out to you at?

Matt Stinchfield

The best one is Pallet Jack. p-a-l-a-t-e jack at gmail.com. It's, it's obviously a play on words, uh, having to do with the implement used for moving a lot of goods around a brewery, a pallet jack. But, uh, also because, uh, you know, I like, uh, I like all the flavor and sensory stuff with judging beer and so on. So that's where the pun came from.

Jerry

That's the one I've been using to contact you. So we appreciate you being here with us today and please let's stay in touch. All right.

Matt Stinchfield

 He sure will, Jerry. Have a happy Thanksgiving and don't overdose on tryptophan. I won't. You take care. Bye now.

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