A FoodSafeR perspective on emerging food safety hazards and associated risk

New article explores how to anticipate tomorrow’s food safety crises

What might the next food safety crisis look like – and, crucially, will we detect it early enough to prevent harm? A new peer‑reviewed article in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems tackles this question head‑on, offering a structured vision of how emerging risks are transforming the global food safety landscape. Drawing on the expertise of the FoodSafeR consortium and its International Advisory Board, the paper examines how climate change, novel food production technologies, evolving supply chains and shifting consumer behaviours are combining to create new and more complex hazards. These range from climate‑driven mycotoxin patterns and new microbial threats to risks linked with alternative proteins, novel processing techniques and increasingly digitalised trade.
To help authorities and operators move from a reactive to a proactive stance, the authors propose a framework for identifying, prioritising and monitoring emerging food safety risks. It integrates horizon scanning, expert judgement and data‑driven tools, and is designed to support early warning and structured decision‑making in a rapidly changing food system.

This conceptual model underpins the development of the FoodSafeR ecosystem, which aims to provide practical methods and indicators that risk assessors, regulators and industry can use to detect weak signals and translate them into timely action. By clarifying terminology and mapping key drivers of change, the article also offers a common language for ongoing collaboration between EU projects working on emerging risks.