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Cyber is the backbone for food and agriculture defense. Adversaries have the means, opportunity, and motivation to break the cyber backbone at will. If or when adversaries carry out an attack of large magnitude, the result could be a massive compromise of food safety, food defenses, and food security. To avoid that dark scenario, agriculture and food companies must properly prepare for a different kind of assault. The place to start is with their own cyber defense systems.

The UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) recently published a new modeling framework to quantify consumers’ risk of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) exposure from food products, using chicken and lettuce value chains as case studies.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, vendor certification has been top of mind for the food industry given the increased requirements and oversight of third-party audits and FDA regulations to better accommodate public health. This article will give a baseline understanding of the regulatory requirements between U.S. federal bodies (FDA, USDA) in comparison to widely known GFSI standards (BRC, SQF, FSSC 22200). Additionally, it will provide insight into key control areas for mitigating risk and adapting business in accordance with the growing emphasis on the importance of food safety culture.

This article examines the food safety and nutrition risks and challenges of plant-based meat alternatives, including allergens, natural toxins, additives, microbial risks, and other issues.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, all industries that need to maintain microbiologically safe environments have shown a renewed interest in antimicrobial coatings and their application.

In the first part of this survey (“Foodborne Parasites: An Insidious Threat to Food Safety and Public Health”), we looked in depth at common pathogenic parasites behind foodborne illness outbreaks and assessed the extensive geography of their origin and prevalence. In this concluding part, we look in detail at industry and regulators’ approaches to preventive control and eradication in response to this expansive threat to the global food supply system and its consumers.
 

Foodborne parasitic diseases are often overlooked or neglected in various food safety control schemes, even though they are known to pose a severe threat to human health and are notoriously difficult to detect, diagnose, and treat. This truth may account for this class of foodborne disease-causing agents being left out of the risk assessment equation.

To improve food safety and reduce the risk of foodborne illness related to meal kits, it is important to evaluate operations with a farm-to-fork lens, ensuring not just the safety of the meal kit itself but also promoting proper handling and preparation by the customer.

Risk communicators should be aware of the uncertainties in the science underlying food safety as well as their own potential biases. Do you understand what this means for your food safety messaging around your brand?

Food safety incidents like cyberattacks are increasing, which require the use of metrics to help prevent and overcome these challenges facing food safety professionals. This is the last in a three-part series looking at enterprise risk management in food safety.