Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign seek to determine the most effective risk management strategies in the produce supply chain.
“The goal of this project is to give the produce industry a tool to estimate microbial risk and help them make decisions around food safety,” said Gabriella Pinto, a doctoral student in the university’s Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, said in a news report from the university. “We developed a framework for the model and then demonstrated use by modeling a test case for leafy greens. That way, we could evaluate different food safety practices and the trade-offs between them.”
The university said the model includes five stages — primary production, harvesting, processing, retail and consumer handling — and a user can estimate the possibility of contamination, increase or reduce contamination or add product testing. The model then outputs the risk of a product testing positive for microbial contamination.
“This model is flexible and allows users to simulate different systems and potential organisms that may affect the produce environment, as well as assessing the effect of different interventions. The results can lead to improved risk management decisions,” said Gustavo Reyes, the co-author of the study.
The research team looked at whether improving washing or product testing did a better job of preventing contaminated products from going on to consumers. The team found that improving washing provided a greater reduction in the risk of a positive test. The university said the research team also found that product testing at the end of processing reduces recall risk, it is at the expense of rejecting lower-risk lots.
“Food is produced mostly outside, in open systems that are in nature, so we’re never going to get to a food system with zero risk of contamination,” Matt Staisewicz, corresponding author on the study, told the university. “People are working on both preventing contamination and processing methods that reduce it. We’re not going to find the perfect method that sterilizes every product, so we need to come up with a menu of options and then find the practices that work best. A lot of what we work on in my lab is thinking about risk, better decision making, and how we can use modern computation for risk modeling.”
