Food Defense

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducted an assignment to collect and test imported honey in 2021 and 2022 for economically motivated adulteration (also known as food fraud), finding 10 percent of samples to be adulterated.

As our agri-food systems transform in response to the changing global context, food safety must keep pace to safeguard consumer health and ensure international trade. By providing avenues to explore how the future may unfold, foresight enables strategic preparedness in food safety to address vulnerabilities and ensure resilience.

Advances in information technology, rapid advances in diagnostic sensitivity, and shifting regulatory requirements are changing the nature of food safety, while macroeconomic trends like globalization, competitive consolidation, and maturation of the industry are altering the structure of the markets. These trends are colliding with shorter-term disruptions like the economic recovery from COVID-19, inflation, and the war in Ukraine, making the near-term future difficult to see.

On November 10, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the National Security Memorandum-16 (NSM-16), which aims to strengthen the security and resilience of the U.S. food supply and agricultural systems. NSM-16 focuses on threats such as climate change, supply chain disruption, cyberattacks, worker safety and workplace development, and other topics.

A risk-based approach is rapidly being incorporated into food safety systems. This can be attributed to the efforts of regulatory agencies and non-governmental organizations to develop requirements for food businesses. This article examines these food safety systems from a systematic, risk-based approach to allow the food safety practitioner to develop and improve food safety.

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.

Food safety has always been an important issue, but like workplace health and safety, its profile is growing and must be viewed as a business essential.

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically disrupted the food supply. This article seeks to explain the transcendent lessons of this national emergency, with the hope that being aware of them will help national decision-makers better prepare for next time. Our food systems, like the larger supply chain, will be challenged in the future with new kinds of disruptions, making it essential that mistakes are not repeated and that proactive, correct solutions are discovered and preparations made now.

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.