Mars, Incorporated has partnered with IBM Research to launch a consortium to drive advances in global food safety. The 'Sequencing the Food Supply Chain Consortium’--a collaborative food safety platform--will leverage advances in genomics to further our understanding of what makes food safe.

The research consortium marks an alternative approach in how companies traditionally tackle unsafe food. While many companies, such as Mars, already have rigorous processes in place to ensure food safety risks are managed appropriately, the application of genomics being pioneered by this consortium will enable an in-depth understanding and categorization of micro-organisms and their activity on a much bigger scale than has previously been possible.