Safe food for infants: An EU-China project to enhance the control of safety risks raised by microbial and chemical hazards all along the infant food chains

Abstract

The EU-project SAFFI targets food for EU's 15 million and China's 45 million children under the age of three. It aims at developing an integrated approach to enhance the identification, assessment, detection and mitigation of health risks raised by microbial and chemical hazards along EU and China infant food chains.

SAFFI will benchmark the main risks through an extensive hazard identification system based on multiple data sources and a risk ranking procedure. It will also develop procedures to enhance top-down and bottom-up hazard control by combining management options with a panel of technologies for the detection and mitigation of priority hazards. Furthermore, it will explore unexpected contaminants by predictive toxicology and improve risk-based food safety management of biohazards by omics and predictive microbiology. SAFFI will co-develop with and deliver to stakeholders a decision-support system (DSS) to enhance safety control all along the food chain. This DSS will integrate the databases, procedures and methods described above and will be a framework for a generic DSS dedicated to other food.

This overall methodology will also be implemented in a complementary Chinese side of the project, and exemplified for each side, with four case studies that were selected to cover priority hazards, main ingredients, processes and control steps of the infant food chain. Resulting databases, tools and procedures will be shared, cross-validated, concatenated, benchmarked and finally harmonized for further use in the EU and China.

This EU-China multi-actor consortium of 20 partners involves academia, food safety authorities, infant food companies, a paediatrics association and technological and data-science SMEs.