The FoodSafeR International Advisory Board, with 25 experts from 18 institutions across four continents, met for a workshop in Barcelona in April 2023. Participants, experts in food safety from various global institutions, focused on microbiological and chemical hazards and risk assessment. They completed pre-workshop surveys on food safety issues, which were analysed for discussion at the event, fostering peer-to-peer dialogue on food safety risk management.

Current and emerging microbiological hazards and risk factors identified Salmonella and Listeria as primary microbial food safety hazards in North America and Europe, with a greater variety of pathogens recognized as high-risk in Africa and Asia due to less controlled food chains. Multi-drug resistant bacteria were also a concern across the study regions.

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FoodSafeR is developing an ‘Open Digital Hub’ as a one-stop-shop for emerging food risk management, which will for the first time, connect and engage experts and stakeholders from across the food system. Curated by the scientific community, FoodSafeR aims to be a trusted source of information, guidelines, and advice in relation to emerging hazards that are posing a risk for food safety.

FoodSafeR is building a specialised community of European and international experts:

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• FoodSafeR Hub

Living Lab 3 was designed to identify indicators for drivers of emerging food safety hazards and was held online on 31st January 2024 organized by AIT. Drivers of food safety risks were identified and sorted along STEEP categories: social, technological, economic, environment and political. Participants were representatives from different research organisations, legal and regulatory organisations and related authorities.

The workshop outcomes were merged with the initial literature search conducted to arrive with a comprehensive list of the most relevant indicators and according databases. An example for technological drivers, their respective indicators and potential underlying databases is presented below. This list of indicators will be used as keywords in the open Digital Hub to search within a list of "DATABASES or WEBSITES".

In the future, an alert system tool will be built in the open digital hub. This is a scalable tool that consists of an interactive dashboard that displays the real-time values of the indicators (based on the underlying data) so that users can follow the trends in the indicators via graphs. Users will also be able to set up the alerts feature so that they are notified if indicators move out of the normal range of values.

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Living Lab 2 was hosted in October and November 2023 by the FSAI in Dublin, Ireland in collaboration with Accenture The Dock and supported by AGES (Austrian Food Safety Authority), IRIS Technology Solutions (Spain) and FOODREGSCI Europe.

Living Lab 2A (LL2A) was a 2-hour virtual design thinking session held on 17th Oct. 2023 with 36 participants from across 13 different food safety agencies across the FoodSafeR network. The primary objective was to understand the roles, the priorities and the problems that exist for the food safety experts when it comes to emerging food risk, and to begin ideating on how an Open Digital Hub might address or solve those problems and opportunities.

The MVP defined from Living Lab 1 (LL1) was presented to the LL2 participants as a starting point for discussions. This virtual session was facilitated by Accenture at the Dock, Dublin. The process culminated in each of the 6 teams framing their ideation in terms of a Value Proposition Statement (simple summary outlining the problem to be solved, and the benefits to be realised through the Open Digital Hub).

Living Lab 2B was an in-person design thinking session held in Accenture The Dock offices in Dublin over two days (23rd & 24th Nov 2023) where a group of 16 participants from LL2A participants engaged in two sessions built around the research themes and innovation opportunities informed from Living Lab 2A.

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Living Lab 1 was held in Barcelona on 27th & 28th April 2023. It united the Work Package Leaders of FoodSafeR consortium with the members of the International Advisory Board. Over the course of a two-day hybrid Living Lab, two core working sessions were held.

Working Session I: International perspectives on the status of current and emerging food safety and security hazards, with a focus on microbiological and chemical risks, from across Europe, USA, China, Africa (Nigeria and Kenya), Thailand, Singapore, Canada, and the different regions worldwide from representatives of organisations around the world dealing with food safety aspects and risk management.

Working Session II: Defining the MVP of the FoodSafeR Open Digital Hub

This working session reviewed and iterated on the first designs of the Open Digital Hub focussing on the first use cases, user requirements and desired user experience. It was a unique opportunity for the FoodSafeR Digital team at IRIS Technology Solutions to consult the user requirements, specifications, and requests for the Open Digital Hub with the food safety and risk experts from within the Consortium and the Advisory Board.

This process enabled the delivery of a mock-up of the core functionality and features of the Hub for its future verification, modification and extension in the second living lab (LL2).

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Food safety, nutrition and food security are closely linked. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), unsafe food leads to a vicious cycle of disease and malnutrition that particularly affects infants and young children, pregnant women, the elderly, and immunocompromised or sick people. The FoodSafeR project aims to make a significant contribution to making the food system safer. 

The complexity of the factors leading to foodborne hazards requires improved information sharing in the international food system and the use of novel techniques - including big data processing - to facilitate future data-driven management by the stakeholders involved. Six Living Labs are being organised as a series of collaborative or participatory workshops in which relevant stakeholders can come together to cocreate and contribute to the shaping the project’s frameworks, tools, methods, strategies, models, guidance and training materials and their interface via the Digital Hub.

The goal of these workshops is to foster participation and collaboration and to stimulate innovation by bringing together different perspectives, skills, and expertise.

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Listeria monocytogenes is a bacterium capable of surviving in food processing environments for long periods of time, posing the threat of product contamination and a risk to public health.

We take a three-tiered approach toward understanding genetic and environmental factors  that may underlie persistence, including:

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Food producers and governmental agencies have a full packet of food safety procedures in place, consisting of -amongst others - regulations, food safety management systems and monitoring programs. While such systems function well under known stable circumstances, the food system and its environment are changing fast, and food safety risks can easily emerge and go out of control (become super risks).

Food safety risk management thus needs to be adapted to be able to cope with the multiple drivers of change, which may arise from within and outside the food supply chain. Examples include political changes, climate change, consumer trends.

The drivers can lead to the emergence of food safety risks. Emerging food safety risk comprise 3 groups: 

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Around 78% of the world’s turmeric production originates from India. For this study, 12 different sites were selected with 9 of them being major producers (Minhas, 2022). 270 dried turmeric powdered samples were collected categorised as follows: (N-53) Open /Market samples, (N-199) branded samples and (N-18) international samples. We extended our analysis by including samples from 3 majorly used e-commerce platforms. Also, 124 international and and 80 branded samples samples were included, reaching the 474 samples in this study. Analysis was carried out by placing sample cups on the nose of the portable XRF covered with an X-ray shielding lid using the empirical factory calibration settings.

The utilization of PXRF as both screening as well as quantitative technique revealed 53 positive results. These results were further categorized into two distinct classes: “partial positive,” indicating results that were below the LOD of PXRF (2mg Pb /kg) marked as ND but still giving a Pb value during analysis and “confirmed positive,” indicating results that showed a Pb value above specified regulatory limits of 1.5 mg/kg. 

PXRF showed a rapid and reliable way for qualitative and semiquantitative analysis of toxic elements like Pb and Cr using inbuilt default calibration. However, despite its high LOD, PXRF holds the potential to be used for real-time analysis for low-resourced countries like India, where regulatory limits are higher (10 mg Pb/kg) as compared to EU (1.5 mg Pb/kg, EC, 2021) in turmeric for lead (FSSAI, 2011). While PXRF holds as a promising, efficient technique to be used for on-field screening of toxic metal adulteration in turmeric, BXRF showed a potential to become a 1st line of validation for PXRF results. However, these measures cannot entirely replace ICP-MS but can be able to decrease the frequency of its utilization.

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Unpasteurized spontaneously fermented vegetables were sampled in Ghent (Belgium) and Vienna (Austria), both in the local and through online shops. The samples were analysed for microbiological quality and food safety parameters (lactic acid bacteria as beneficial bacteria, Enterobacteriaceae and Escherichia coli as process hygiene indicators, Listeria monocytogenes as a foodborne pathogen. When fermenting vegetables, often mentioned key factors which ensure the safety of the product are (i) the use of starter cultures, and (ii) a heat treatment. However, these control measures will affect the bacterial biodiversity and probiotic quality and may resultin an altered lactofermentation. Therefore, spontaneous fermentation is often preferred. However, the reliance on indigenousmicrobiota can affect safety and predictability of the fermentation process because the microbial load and activity of naturallypresent lactic acid bacteria that reside on the (shredded/cut) vegetables can be variable.  A good practice is to see that:

1. Washed vegetables are completely submerged in (3-4%) saltwater brine until the jar is almost full and the jar is tightly closed
2. The acidification (pH drop) by the lactic acid bacteria should result in a pH < 4.2
3. The fermentation time should be at least 14 days (usually at 18-21°C under anaerobic conditions)
4. The sensory attributes are acceptable: check for off-odours or visual mould formation.

If one of these conditions has not been met, discard the product as not only the quality, but also the safety of the spontaneous fermented vegetable product cannot be guaranteed. During the FoodSafeR project survey, most market samples have shown to comply with a pH level lower than 4.2. On a few occasions, persisting Enterobacteriaceae indicated either a too slow pH-decrease with related favourable initial growth conditions or a too short fermentation time.

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