The food safety survey instrument was developed using Qualtrics® software (Appendix A of the attached document). The questionnaire was designed to take less than 30 minutes to complete and addressed four areas related to food safety and growing food businesses: (1) challenges and constraints for implementing food safety practices, (2) external and internal elements for growing food businesses, (3) recommendations for adopting food safety practices and (4) the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic will have on food safety.

Most questions were multiple choice, and the results are presented as the percent of respondents who selected a given answer. Several questions asked respondents to rank a list of challenges and barriers from one to five or one to six, where one represented the greatest challenge. The results for rank order questions are presented as the mean rank value for a given challenge.

We solicited 39 invitations via LinkedIn and 59 via direct emails between May 20, 2021, and June 22, 2021, with a goal of obtaining at least 18 responses in total. We focused on food safety experts who were from Ethiopia, Senegal and Nepal, or who had worked on food safety projects in lower- and middle-income countries. Once a person agreed to participate in our survey, they were sent a personalized link to the Qualtrics® questionnaire.