Organizational unlearning: A risky food safety strategy?

Strategically unlearning specific knowledge, behaviors, and practices facilitates product and process innovation, business model evolution, and new market opportunities and is essential to meet emergent supply chain and customer requirements. Indeed, addressing societal concerns such as climate change and net zero means elements of contemporary practice in food supply chains need to be unlearned to ensure new practices are adopted. However, unlearning is a risky process if crucial knowledge is lost, for example, if knowledge is situated in the supply base not the organization itself, or there is insufficient organizational food safety knowledge generation, curation, and management when new practices/processes are designed and implemented. An exploratory, critical review of management and food safety academic and gray literature is undertaken that aims to consider the cycle of unlearning, learning, and relearning in food organizations and supply chains with particular emphasis on organizational innovation, inertia, and the impact on food safety management systems and food safety performance. Findings demonstrate it is critical with food safety practices, such as duration date coding or refrigeration practices, that organizations “unlearn” in a way that does not increase organizational, food safety, or public health risk. This paper contributes to extant literature by highlighting the organizational vulnerabilities that can arise when strategically unlearning to promote sustainability in a food supply context. Mitigating such organizational, food safety, and public health risk means organizations must simultaneously drive unlearning, learning, and relearning as a dynamic integrated knowledge acquisition and management approach. The research implications are of value to academics, business managers, and wider industry.     

From cobalt to chloropropanol: de tribulationibus aptis cerevisiis imbibendis

Growing consumer expectations, technological developments and legislative pressures are the main drivers in raising food safety standards. Nevertheless, food safety “scares” and product recalls have become all too common to a public sensitised by BSE, E.coli and Salmonella incidents. With the prospect of a UK Food Standards Agency, the agenda is set for the introduction of even greater transparency. For example, data generated in government food surveys, including product brand names, are now routinely posted on the Internet. In his Laurence Bishop Memorial Lecture, David Long considered food safety issues which have challenged, or are currently challenging, the brewing industry; looking particularly from an analytical perspective. Analytical sensitivity is developing more rapidly than our understanding of the toxicology of specific analytes at the low concentrations which now can be measured routinely. Future research should move towards a more “holistic” approach to understand the actual balance of toxic and protective components in the food matrix rather than to assess the toxicology of components in isolation.     

生命周期视角下食品碳足迹的评估及案例分析

“减排降碳”“碳达峰”“碳中和”已经成为全球气候治理的焦点,作为衡量气候变暖的重要工具,碳足迹可以对食品生命周期内的温室气体排放量进行量化评估,帮助人们提出碳减排的措施。本文从国内外的研究现状出发,以生命周期评价理论为基础,系统阐述碳足迹分析模型和食品产业链排放源,对国内外研究趋势进行可视化分析,并进一步对该领域内面临的挑战、政策环境、消费者购买行为进行讨论,以期为完善我国食品碳足迹标签制度提供借鉴。     

An RFID application in the food supply chain: A case study of convenience stores in Taiwan

Food hazards can appear at any stage of global food supply chains, making it essential to define critical control points to capture the data about ingredients, manufacture and dates-certain (sell-by, use-by), etc., and provide it in a transparent manner to supply chain participants and consumers. The government of Taiwan has appointed a non-profit research organization to conduct a pilot project to launch a potential national-wide food traceability system to increase the intangible value of purchased food and to enhance food safety. This paper discusses a financially viable business model for a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) application to a food traceability system. We conduct a case study of RFID implementation in the chain of convenience stores in Taiwan. The Taiwanese experiment may have implications for policy-makers, industry and public health officials elsewhere.     

Food defence system in food industry: perspective of the EU countries

Nowadays, incidents related to intentional contamination of food products are a huge problem in the whole food supply chain. Therefore, it is necessary to raise awareness of food defence at every level of the food chain, from farm to fork, from government and academic institutions to retail chains, the media and consumers. The principles of food defence can be implemented at every level of the food chain. Food defence contributes to the mitigation of potential risks in intentional contamination and food fraud, which can have a harmful effect on humans and public health, business, economy, etc. The requirement for the implementation of food defence comes from retail chains. They require food companies to be certified according to the standards of the food safety system such as those supported by the Global Food Safety Initiative. Although food defence is an inevitable step in enhancing and strengthening the whole food safety system, on a global scale, an insufficient number of countries have incorporated food defence principles into their legal frameworks. The intention of this review article is to increase awareness of food defence in food industry.     

A Guidance Document on the Best Practices in Food Traceability

Several regulatory agencies around the world are involved in rulemaking to improve the traceability of foods. Given the complexity of the global food system, guidance on improving traceability practices across the entire food industry is a challenge. A review of the current regulations and best practices indicates that “one back, one forward” is the minimum traceability requirement. There are also no uniform requirements across different food sectors, supply chains, or countries for collection of Critical Tracking Events (CTEs) and Key Data Elements (KDEs). There is a need for standardized and harmonized requirements across all food sectors compared with developing specialized rules and mandates, including exceptions, for specific foods. This document presents food traceability best practices guidance and it addresses the unknowns and gaps in understanding and the broad applicability of a CTE–KDE framework. It applies this framework to 6 food sectors as bakery, dairy, meat and poultry, processed foods, produce, and seafood. An analysis of similarities and differences across these sectors is conducted to determine broader applicability to other foods. Fifty‐five experts from 11 countries were involved in developing this guidance. This guidance document is intended for regulatory agencies and the food industry. Regulators will find it useful in developing regulations and/or guidance applicable to most foods. Industry will find the minimum criteria that are necessary to manage a proper food traceability system, with the understanding that companies can choose to exceed the minimum level of criteria established. This guidance is intended to serve as a step toward consistent baseline requirements for food traceability.     

AIEgens: An emerging fluorescent sensing tool to aid food safety and quality control

As a global public health problem, food safety has attracted increasing concern. To minimize the risk exposure of food to harmful ingredients, food quality and safety inspection that covers the whole process of “from farm to fork” is much desired. Fluorescent sensing is a promising and powerful screening tool for sensing hazardous substances in food and thus plays a crucial role in promoting food safety assurance. However, traditional fluorphores generally suffer the problem of aggregation‐caused quenching (ACQ) effect, which limit their application in food quality and safety inspection. In this regard, luminogens with aggregation‐induced emission property (AIEgens) showed large potential in food analysis since AIEgens effectively surmount the ACQ effect with much better detection sensitivity, accuracy, and robustness. In this contribution, we review the latest developments of food safety monitoring by AIEgens, which will focus on the molecular design of AIEgens and their sensing principles. Several examples of AIE‐based sensing applications for screening food contaminations are highlighted, and future perspectives and challenges in this emerging field are tentatively elaborated. We hope this review can motivate new research ideas and interest to aid food safety and quality control, and facilitate more collaborative endeavors to advance the state‐of‐the‐art sensing developments and reduce actual translational gap between laboratory research and industrial production.     

Access to common resources and food security: Evidence from National Surveys in Nigeria

Common resources (CRs) provide a “hidden harvest” for rural households and can also act as a safety net in the event of poor agricultural output or seasonal food gaps, hence contributing to food security. Yet only limited empirical research has assessed the relationship between CRs and the self-assessed food security conditions recorded among rural households. This exploratory paper draws on recent data from the Nigerian General Household Survey (GHS), a nationally representative sample of households administered in 2012–2013 as part of the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study — Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA). A sustainable livelihood framework was used to contextualise CR access within the broader set of food security drivers. In Nigeria, access to common pasture and water resources is significantly associated with less reporting of food insecurity. In contrast, access to common forest tends to be associated with food insecurity, suggesting that households with access to common forest remain vulnerable (i.e. isolated from services and opportunities) despite having the advantage of the forest as a source of food. Echoing existing literature, the relative importance of these commons decreases when income of households increases. However, there are no clear signs that access to commons acts as a seasonal safety net for households during the lean season. The paper advocates streamlining CR data collection alongside agricultural data for a more integrated food security policy intervention aimed at the most vulnerable.     

The regulatory environment past and future — incentive or impediment to developments in food science and technology: A perspective from FDA∗

The best system for protecting public health is one that involves two layers of control before food reaches the consumer. The first layer of control is the industry's clear responsibility to prepare food that is safe. The second layer of control is the monitoring that is provided by government to ensure that the industry is doing its job and is in fact producing safe food.

While some may view this “second layer” as an impediment in the development and marketing of new technologies, there is another way to look at the “regulatory environment”. The regulatory environment itself, is not an impediment to the development of food science and technology.

The regulatory environment, with all its components — scientists, consumers, industry, and Congress — defines “safety” within the context of today's technology, scientific capability, and tolerance level of the lay public. The entire regulatory environment serves to guide the development of food science and technology by providing signposts, in the form of scientifically sound regulatory decisions. The scientific basis of these decisions becomes building blocks on which to rest further refinement of the technology, product, ingredient, or packaging material or on which research in related technologies or research in innovative directions can build.

This scientific groundwork becomes very important as more and more companies move away from having self‐contained research laboratories toward using commercial laboratories and academic institutions, as well as participating in cooperative research endeavors to meet food safety and product development research needs. These changes in the way industry is doing business today clearly indicate a direction that will impact on the “regulatory environment” in the next few years — a direction that will include deeper commitment of private/public sector cooperation in generating the data and information that defines safety for any given technology or product. The shift to commercial labs and academic institutions is occurring at the same time the consumer continues to believe that food is “safe”, novel technologies and products are entering the market at an ever increasing rate, the market is moving toward a more global food supply, and significant changes are taking place in the food safety/inspection infrastructure. To meet these challenges, the academic institutions will take on more importance. To the extent that food scientists from industry dissipate, other food scientists — particularly those in academic settings — must assume additional responsibilities. Further changes will come in the way we do business.

In the words of Robert McVicker, Kraft General Foods’ Dr. VP of Technology, Quality Assurance and Scientific Relations, describing one public/private sector cooperative effort, the National Center for Food Safety and Technology, “It is clear that in forming the National Center our key objective is the generation and fostering of scientific and technical knowledge and the exchange of this knowledge among the agency, industry, and academic partners. In working side by side, I believe we will learn that our goals are very similar and are, in fact, identical. Through partnerships and strategic alliances such as we are forging, we will continue to deliver safe and wholesome foods to American consumers.”     

Minimising food waste: a call for multidisciplinary research

Food losses and waste have always been a significant global problem for mankind, and one which has become increasingly recognised as such by policy makers, food producers, processors, retailers, and consumers. It is, however, an emotive subject whereby the extent, accuracy and resolution of available data on postharvest loss and waste are questionable, such that key performance indicators on waste can be misinformed. The nature and extent of food waste differ among developed economies, economies in transition and developing countries. While most emphasis has been put on increasing future crop production, far less resource has been and is still channelled towards enabling both established and innovative food preservation technologies to reduce food waste while maintaining safety and quality. Reducing food loss and waste is a more tractable problem than increasing production in the short to medium term, as its solution is not directly limited, for instance, by available land and water resources. Here we argue the need for a paradigm shift of current funding strategies and research programmes that will encourage the development, implementation and translation of collective biological, engineering and management solutions to better preserve and utilise food. Such multidisciplinary thinking across global supply chains is an essential element in the pursuit of achieving sustainable food and nutritional security. The implementation of allied technological and management solutions is reliant on there being sufficient skilled human capital and resources. There is currently a lack of robust postharvest research networks outside of the developed world, and insufficient global funding mechanisms that can support such interdisciplinary collaborations. There is, thus, a collective need for schemes that encourage inter‐supply chain research, knowledge exchange and capacity building to reduce food losses and waste. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry     

“十四五”全球供需视角下2019/20年榨季我国食糖消费形势分析与2020/21年榨季展望

2019/20年榨季我国食糖期货、现货价格受全球疫情和供需基本面影响呈现不断走低态势,进口政策、糖浆进口和糖醇替代等不确定因素对产业影响加强,2019/20年榨季食糖消费量下降至1480万t的水平,呈现“甜度需求减少、工业消费下滑、市场不确定性增加”特点。本文结合宏观经济、食品工业发展、供需平衡等维度分析2019/20年榨季我国食糖消费形势,预计2020/21年榨季食糖消费回升至1530万t,总体呈现“甜度需求增加、工业消费增长、淀粉糖或收缩、糖醇增量稳定”特征。     

食品安全中风险-受益评估框架构建与方法

食品的风险-受益评估(risk-benefit assessment, RBA)是通过综合描述某种食物或食物成分的风险和效益特征,评估在一定的暴露水平下,摄入该食物对人体健康的总影响是有益还是有害,是一个开放的、不断建立和完善的应用方法体系。食品安全领域开展风险-受益评估研究是制定食品安全政策和决策以及引导合理膳食的重要依据。本综述系统介绍食品安全中风险-受益评估的评估框架构建,以及不同层级食品(食品组分或膳食)的风险-受益评估方法与评估过程等技术内容,并进一步提出该研究领域在食品安全中的应用现状与展望。     

Agroterrorism: Issues of Reality

ABSTRACT: In the past, deliberate contamination of foods in the U.S. has been committed by individual criminals, disgruntled employees, or political activists with a narrow agenda. After September 11, 2001, every nation has had to consider a much wider range of food security issues. Food is a global commodity and nearly every country both exports and imports foods. Every nation must consider the security of its domestic production and look beyond its borders to its trading partners to assure the safety of its food supply. In the nearly 2 years since September 11, 2001, many steps have been taken to improve food security. New legislation has been enacted to strengthen the ability of government to respond to terrorist threats. New relationships have been forged between food security agencies, law enforcement, and the intelligence community. Virtually every segment of the domestic and imported food supply has come under scrutiny in an effort to identify points of weakness and appropriate protective measures. Gaps in our knowledge about specific agents and food processes have been identified and research to fill these gaps has been initiated. This effort will continue for the foreseeable future and could have a wide range of benefits, including improvements to food safety, a reduction in product counterfeiting, and a reduction in the "gray market" food trade. The scale and diversity of the U.S. food supply makes it an attractive target, but at the same time makes it very resilient and responsive to emerging threats.     

Farm‐to‐table: A Situation Awareness Model for Food Safety Assurance for Porous Borders

Aldous Huxley's Brave NewWorld (1932) was far more prescient to the situation of food safety today than we dare to consider. When people are seduced rather than compelled to live in harmony, evil is not so obvious because no one is looking. In the instance of food safety, changes in world trade, consumer demand for variety, and an increasingly complex regulatory system create challenges to effective vigilance and mitigation. It remains a critical reality that in any “farm‐to‐table” scenario, multiple sources, suppliers, and steps along the process pose a threat to the safety of the product. Here we discuss the effect of “porous borders” with reference to spread of disease and bio‐threats to food fabrication practices and regulatory agencies. We show that understanding correspondences between the morphology of global food production and product tracing/tracking technologies are critical to the real‐time performance of situation awareness prediction systems. Our reconstruction of the events associated with securing safe food opens a pathway to advancing the primitives necessary for an appropriate real‐time knowledge‐sharing system for start‐to‐finish data sources that assist detection/prediction assurance models.     

营养安全视角下的食品加工应用研究

粮食和营养安全是当前全球关注的一项重要议题,预计到2050年全球人口将达到90亿,意味着需要通过继续增加粮食产量来解决日益复杂的粮食安全问题。与此同时减少从生产到消费整个供应链环节的食物损失浪费,以及通过食品加工为人类提高食品保存期限、营养质量以及食品安全也引起了极大的重视。本文通过文献梳理描述了初级食品生产系统的发展,以及食品加工对人类健康以及营养安全的作用。从未来的发展趋势来看,无论是农业生产部门还是食品加工部门都将面临用更少的资源来生产更多食品的问题。因而本文认为面对世界资源的日益紧张,必须对食品的能量和营养含量加以平衡,促进食品加工环节营养安全的提高,不失为一个良策。     

Harmonization of legislation and regulations to achieve food safety: US and Canada perspective

Trade in food and food ingredients among the nations of the world is rapidly expanding and, with this expansion, new supply chain partners, from globally disparate geographic regions, are being enrolled. Food and food ingredients are progressively sourced more from lesser developed nations. Food safety incidents in the USA and Canada show a high unfavorable correlation between illness outbreaks and imported foods. In the USA, for example, foodborne disease outbreaks caused by imported food appeared to rise in 2009 and 2010, and nearly half of the outbreaks, associated with imported food, implicated foods imported from areas which previously had not been associated with outbreaks. Projecting supply chains into new geographical regions raises serious questions about the capacity of the new supply chain partners to provide the requisite regulatory framework and sufficiently robust public health measures for ensuring the safety of the foods and foodstuffs offered for international trade. The laws, regulation and legislation among the many nations participating in the global food trade are, at best, inconsistent. These inconsistencies frequently give rise to trade disputes and cause large quantities of food to be at risk of destruction on the often dubious pretext that they are not safe. Food safety is often viewed through a political or normative lens. Often as not, this lens has been wrought absent scientific precision. Harmonization of food safety legislation around sound scientific principles, as advocated by the US Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), would ultimately promote trade and likely provide for incremental improvement in public health. Among the priority roles of most national governments are the advancement of commerce and trade, preservation of public health and ensuring domestic tranquility. Achieving these priorities is fundamental to creating and preserving the wealth of nations. Countries such as the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, Japan and the USA, for example, have very stable governments, are leaders in trade and commerce and enjoy high standards of public health. It is not by accident or coincidence that these nations are also among the world's wealthiest. Attainment of national priorities, especially those related to promoting trade in foodstuffs and also in preserving public health (food safety), would benefit greatly from international efforts in harmonizing food safety regulations and legislation. © 2013 Society of Chemical Industry     

纸上微型实验室在食品检测领域的研究进展

“纸上微型实验室”是以纸为基底的微型分析系统,其因高灵敏、低成本、便携化、可批量生产等独特优势突破了传统检测技术的局限,在食品现场快速检测领域展现出巨大应用潜力。本文梳理了典型的“纸上微型实验室”,分别对纸层析法、化学试纸、侧流层析试纸条、纸基微流控分析装置和合成生物学纸进行全面综述,并重点介绍了“纸上微型实验室”在食品检测领域中的应用,最后讨论了纸基分析方法的优势、挑战和发展趋势,以期为“纸上微型实验室”更全面地应用于食品检测领域提供理论支撑。     

Agrosecurity: The Role of the Agricultural Experiment Stations

ABSTRACT: In order to protect the nation's agriculture and food processing systems from the new threat of bioterror‐ism, agricultural and food technology research must be effectively harnessed and applied. The U.S. conducts the majority of its agricultural research through state‐based Agricultural Experiment Stations. To respond to the new challenges of biosecurity, and to facilitate communication between the federal research system and the state‐based agricultural research system, the Directors of the State Agricultural Experiment Stations (SAES) facilitated the creation of a National Institute for Agricultural Security (NIAS). The mission of NIAS is to help address national homeland security and biosecurity issues that affect the nation's farms and ranches, food production and distribution system, and rural communities by harnessing, coordinating, and targeting agricultural research and food science technology projects. NIAS was created to provide a “front door” and “one‐stop shopping” for federal agencies and the public. NIAS is currently developing projects to improve site security at SAES field stations and laboratories. The Institute is facilitating the development of prototype‐secured information technology networks. NIAS is serving as a liaison to federal agency offices to help identify high priority agricultural and food science research needs. The Institute is also exploring the possibility of collaborating in the development of regional pathogen outbreak simulations with the regional university coordinators of the Dept. of Agriculture's National Plant Diagnostics Network (NPDN). NIAS is collaborating with the Institute for Countermeasures Against Bioterrorism to host an international workshop on the managing of events when harmful pathogens are introduced into the food supply. And, NIAS is exploring the potential role of university Cooperative Extension Service as part of the “first responder network,” as “first detectors,” and as facilitators for helping rural community leaders plan to address homeland security concerns.     

纳米材料在食源性致病菌检测的研究进展

食品安全问题已经成为全球研究热点问题之一,其中由食源性致病菌引起的食源性疾病频发,对公众健康和财产造成重大的影响。近年来,人们的食品安全意识呈显著增强趋势,食源性致病菌引起的食品安全问题引起了广泛关注。纳米材料具有高灵敏度、高选择性、便携性和低成本等优点,越来越广泛地应用于食源性致病菌的检测,逐渐能够取代传统的检测方式。因此,本文结合近些年国内外的纳米材料在食源性致病菌检测中的研究,综述了不同类型的纳米材料用于检测食源性致病菌的检测原理及其应用。此外,本文讨论了该领域中的研究挑战和前景,以期为今后食品安全提供保障,及时发现不合格、不健康、不安全的食品中的食源性致病菌。     

Invited review: The consumer and dairy food waste: An individual plus policy,systems, and environmental perspective

An estimated 40% of food produced in the United States is wasted, which poses a significant barrier to achieving a sustainable future—so much so that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal no. 12, to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns,” includes a goal to “halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer level, and reduce food losses along the production and supply chains by 2030.” Annually, consumers waste approximately 90 billion pounds of food, equating to roughly 1 pound per person per day. More specifically, consumer waste is the largest contributor to the food waste problem when compared with other steps along the supply chain, such as production, post-harvest handling and storage, processing, and distribution. Furthermore, American families discard approximately 25% of the food and beverages they buy. When considering the type of waste coming from households, fresh fruits and vegetables rank highest at 22%, with dairy products, at 19%, following in close second. A variety of factors contribute to why consumers waste so much food. For dairy, commonly referenced reasons are related to the misunderstanding of date labels, poor planning of purchases, spoilage before consuming products, and improper storage. This wasted food accumulates in landfills and produces methane when decomposing, resulting in environmental consequences related to ozone depletion and climate change. Milk can have negative environmental impacts when disposed of down the drain. This review will discuss the food waste problem, causes, and potential solutions at the consumer level, with particular focus on dairy waste. An individual plus policy, system, and environment approach will also be integrated to provide a well-rounded view of the issue.