Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are on a mission to identify the most efficient ways to manage risks within the produce supply chain. Gabriella Pinto, a doctoral student in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, emphasizes the importance of this project. “The aim is to provide the produce industry with a valuable tool that can estimate microbial risks and assist them in making informed decisions regarding food safety,” she explains.

Developing a Framework for Risk Assessment

The university has developed a comprehensive model that encompasses five crucial stages - primary production, harvesting, processing, retail, and consumer handling. This model empowers users to assess the likelihood of contamination, make decisions to either increase or decrease it, or incorporate product testing. By doing so, it outputs the risk of a product testing positive for microbial contamination. As Gustavo Reyes, a co-author of the study, points out, “This model is highly flexible, enabling users to simulate various systems and potential organisms that could impact the produce environment. It also allows for the evaluation of different interventions and their effects.”

Evaluating Different Food Safety Practices

The research team conducted in-depth studies to determine whether improving washing or increasing product testing would be more effective in preventing contaminated products from reaching consumers. They found that enhancing washing significantly reduced the risk of a positive test. Additionally, the university noted that product testing at the end of the processing stage helps reduce recall risks but comes at the cost of rejecting lower-risk lots. Matt Staisewicz, the corresponding author, stated, “Since food is produced mostly outdoors in open systems, we can never achieve a food system with zero contamination risk. Therefore, we need to explore a range of options and identify the practices that work best.”

Balancing Prevention and Processing

People are constantly working on both preventing contamination and developing processing methods to minimize it. As Staisewicz further explains, “We won’t find a perfect sterilization method for every product. Instead, we need to create a menu of options and select the practices that offer the highest level of safety. In our lab, a significant portion of our work focuses on risk assessment, better decision-making, and leveraging modern computation for risk modeling.”