Food safety

Food production is an essential activity for humans, for already thousands of years. For a long period of time, the production was not always sufficient to feed the total population, but in more recent years food production (video 10 minutes) became so successful that many countries can feed the national population and export the remaining foods to other countries. With the export of foods, safety became a global issue. To deal with that issue, the Codex Alimentarius was created. This organization sets the food quality standards, that are to be used by all countries of the world when trading foods and animal feed.

The countries are requested to copy the Codex standards in their national legislation. In the European Union it was decided to create a legal framework of Regulations and Directives on food quality standards, that are compulsory for all EU Member States. Doing so, the EU has created an internal market where food that complies can freely be traded. Food and feed imported from the "third countries" is subject to official control.

Official control

The EU asks the Member States to control foods and animal feed to see whether it complies with the legislation or not. A relevant aspect of this control is to check if the foods and feed do not pose a health risk for the consumers. It should be noted here, that the quality standards are not just based on consumers' health. This means that additional steps are needed to evaluate possible health risks for food and feed that is not compliant to the Regulations.

Food safety risk assessment

To evaluate possible health risks of foods and feed for the consumer, it is a common approach to compare the intake of chemical compounds through food and feed with an amount of that compound that is shown to cause adverse health effects. Based on experimental data, a limit value for the maximum permissible exposure is derived by toxicological experts; these values are then used in an exposure assessment. Various databases can be found on the Internet, with limit values for a large number of chemical compounds; these databases include information on relevant adverse effects and on how the limit values were derived. Special attention is focused on chemical compounds that can cause cancer, as cancer is considered to be more hazardous than other adverse health effects.

Exposure to chemical compounds from food or feed show variations between individuals, caused by consumption habits of different regions (like consumption of rice in Europe and the Far East), but also caused by different ages and of other properties of the consumers (like its body weight). Consequently it is needed to use databases with consumption quantities for the evaluation of intake of chemical substances in food or feed. Most of these databases provide average (mean) consumption quantities, but other databases might include also higher percentiles. Besides there are databases with consumption data of individual consumers; these data are best suited to evaluate the intake of chemical compounds, as their results show the common variation of intake by the whole population.

Other risks

Next to the tools to evaluate health risks for consumers due to intake of chemical substances, exposure to microbiological agents might also be relevant for food safety. Besides to health risks, economical and political risks can play a role in the evaluation of a food safety situation. There are various trainings and sources of information on food safety; universities offer programs where one can become more familiar with the topic. With these you can work in food industries but also in governmental organizations who are always looking for experts that can help to provide the market with healthy foods that are compliant to the food safety systems on the global scale.

Articles

Background information on the Foodsafetyportal on food safety assessment and helpful tools was published in Food Control, Volume 158, April 2024, p110227 with details of the databases and methods of selection of the appropriate data by the developer of this website. This paper explains some of the algorithms that are implemented in the tools, and describes organizations and documents that play a major role in the food safety system at present.

A paper about issues about the exposure assessment and risk characterization is also included in this portal. It is published as a chapter of the book entitled: Chemical contaminants in foods: Understanding and managing risks (Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing, Cambridge, UK, 2025). This book was published in December2025.