Food Defense

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Taking a page out of the pharmaceutical industry's pharmacovigilance playbook, this article discusses why Food Safety and Quality Assurance (FSQA) teams need to monitor product performance after reformulation or process changes—and how to start.

Food safety begins in the field, the barn, and the watershed, not at the processing plant. The concept of preharvest biosurveillance—the systematic, continuous monitoring and management of biological threats before harvest—is now central to building safer and more resilient food systems. 

Of the products (including chips, mayonnaise, and salad dressings) labeled to contain avocado oil as the sole declared edible oil, 89 percent contained fatty acid and sterol profiles indicating the presence of other oils.

According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's (CFIA’s) 2024–2025 Food Fraud Annual Report, CFIA tested 886 food samples for authenticity and conducted 362 label verifications. Olive oil had the lowest authenticity compliance rate.

The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) recommendations were informed by lessons learned from the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi incidents, which demonstrated that radioactive contamination of food can have long-lasting public health and economic consequences.

The Alert and Cooperation Network (ACN), which enables EU Member States to exchange information and coordinate responses to food safety incidents, processed a record 10,490 notifications. Notable incidents included a Listeria outbreak linked to French cheese, Salmonella in Italian tomatoes, and cereulide in infant formula.

Four European research and innovation projects—SecureFood, EFF-CoP, ACT4FOOD, and DEFENSEFOOD—will host a joint webinar on July 3, titled, "Advancing Food System Security: From Early Signals to Systemic Resilience.”

AI-enhanced biosurveillance, integrated sensor networks, and intelligent analytics have been framed as critical enablers of safer, more efficient food systems. At the same time, the field has begun to acknowledge that the same tools that drive efficiency and predictive power can also be turned against the food system itself. 

Supply chains are going digital, omnichannel operations are becoming the norm, and automation is everywhere. This should be good news for food fraud prevention. More data should mean more visibility, but in reality, it also creates more opportunities for both prevention and exploitation.

In 2025, FDA sampled domestic and imported honey to detect food fraud. Consistent with previous years, the rate of fraud was low, but still high enough to emphasize the ongoing vulnerability of honey to economically motivated adulteration.