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Context, targets
and scientific issues

Project aims

• Methodological development
• The case-studies
• Case study n°1
• Case study n°2
• Case study n°3 & n°4

Innovative aspects

The project networks - Contact

• The project networks
• Contacts

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Methodological development

This project aims at providing food business operators with a new methodology for the management of their food safety systems. At a moment where hesitations can be observed as the traditional “hazard-based” approach is confronted with the paradigm of a “risk-based” approach recommended by international organizations, we deliberately intend to help the operators to enter into the risk-based era. That does not mean operators have to deal directly with the risk or with public health outcomes arising from their products. This is and will remain the responsibility of the competent authority, the risk manager. For the operator, we will recommend methods using the modelling tools of the type used for formal quantitative risk assessment within the risk analysis framework of the Codex Alimentarius, such as (Markov Chain) Monte Carlo simulations and Bayesian networks.

Setting critical limits at CCP is supposed to be based on a quantitative justification, but few quantitative tools are used to achieve this. We propose to define these operational values, the critical limits, which are already known and used by numerous operators, as the process criteria and product criteria, which themselves are derived from the performance objectives. Therefore the project aims at linking targets (food safety objectives, performance objectives) established by the risk manager or the operator, on the one hand, and operational values (critical limits, process and product criteria) on the other hand. In other terms, we expect the HACCP system can become quantitative, in the sense that modular process modelling is used to establish the above links and to do importance analysis in order to determine where the process can effectively be improved and re-engineered. We propose to incorporate the risk-based modelling approach in the hazard-based traditional operational approach. This means modelling the process (including physical model and predictive microbiology) to estimate the efficacy of each control measure modelling different control strategies (based on one ore more control measures) to optimise re-engineering; and modelling sampling uncertainty to optimise sampling procedures.

Even though the project is primarily built to answer food business operators’ needs, it will also, as a positive collateral effect, enable the competent authority, the risk manager, and its services to gain knowledge about these new tools of risk management and especially how they can be applied by the operators.

 

The National Research Programme on Food and Human Nutrition (PNRA) of the French National Agency for research (ANR) aims at financing research projects in order to support innovation in the food industry and the acquisition of knowledge on foodstuff, food chain, consumer and the interactions between consumers’ behaviour, food, health and food policies. The present proposal fulfils numerous of these requirements as it will cover different axes. More specifically, this project belongs to axis 2 “Food safety”, part A “Food Microbiology” and aims to answer to one of the expected points: “The contribution of methodologies of quantitative assessment of the biological risks and design of integrating devices of prevention of the risks on the whole manufacturing process”. This project also partly covers requirements of axis 4 "Technologies and food processes" (priority for 2007), through a “process of reengineering of the processes with a multicriterion approach which takes into account: sanitary, organoleptic and nutritional qualities of the products, as well as their incidence on the environment and the constraints of technical and economic management of means, raw materials, energy, water and fluids". Last, the prroject meets many priorities designed for 2007 (based on lacks of the two previous years), inesent pcluding “methodologies to evaluate benefits and risks linked to the food chain”, “integrated approaches of the food quality, from consumer level back to food production”, “the evolution of technologies and food processes answering to quality criteria and/or safety of the products”, “food and nutritional policies”. Also, as mentioned in the call, "the approaches of modelling, simulation and mathematic contribution are particularly expected".