BioMérieux and Mérieux NutriSciences have announced the launch of a new data-driven Trusted Third Party initiative, built with a group of global food industry partners to foster safe industry collaboration and to better anticipate and prevent food safety risks.

Despite strong efforts, the food industry continues to cope with numerous safety and quality issues leading to public health threats, recalls, and operational impacts. Changing the status quo and enhancing food safety control systems necessitates looking beyond the current systems based primarily on auditing, certification, and testing. This is why bioMérieux and Mérieux NutriSciences have developed an innovative and collaborative model where both companies jointly act as a Trusted Third Party, together with some of the largest global food industry players.

Based on meaningful business questions identified by all food industry partners, data is confidentially and securely aggregated from all participating partners and is combined with other publicly available data of interest (i.e., commodity pricing, food safety events, weather, and etc.). The objective is to deliver consolidated anonymous insights and support business critical decision-making, strengthening partners’ food safety risk management programs and supply chain integrity, while promoting competitiveness among industry players to reach higher quality and safety standards. Although the model currently focuses on supplier risk management as the initial priority, it will serve multiple additional applications in the near future.

Barry Callebaut, Danone, Mars, Mondelēz International, Nestlé, and PepsiCo have been involved as early partners in the exploration and design of the model over the last two years. Each company shared initial datasets to build the proof-of-concept and evaluate potential interest, helped identify key business questions and food safety issues, contributed to the platform design, and now supports the model development and expansion.

BioMérieux and Mérieux NutriSciences are now ready to welcome additional members with the ambition of maximizing scalability of this model within the next months to accelerate value creation for the food industry and improve overall consumer safety.