Improving food allergen management in food manufacturing: An incentive-based approach

To date there is no cure for food allergies and the only way for consumers to prevent allergic reactions is to avoid trigger allergens. Despite the importance of declaring food allergens in food manufacturing, the number of incidents due to undeclared food allergens has been high in recent years. In an article, recently published in the journal ‘Food Control’, Dr Lili Jia and Prof Steve Evans demonstrated that lacking incentives to improve food allergen management is key, and proposed a novel solution, named incentive-based approach, to tackle this challenge.

Food allergen management is on the top of the global food safety agenda. Between 2008 and 2018 there were 2932 food safety incidents and recalls globally and 46% of them (1354 incidents) were due to undeclared food allergens – the highest among the top four hazards (including undeclared food allergens, biological contamination, physical contamination and chemicals contamination). On 26 April 2021, the U.S. congress passed the Food Allergy Safety, Treatment, Education and Research Act (H.R. 1202/S.578) to include sesame in the major allergen list. The UK will embark Natasha’s Law from October 2021 to mandate the labelling of food allergens for food prepared and pre-packed for direct sale in-store, such as sandwiches.

In this article Dr Lili Jia and Prof Steve Evans tackle this challenge by generating a comprehensive list of operational errors in food allergen management for food manufacturers, which allows them to learn operational errors from each other and speed up their learning curves. They found that food allergen management can be improved by harnessing its social, environmental and economic benefits and by reducing its social, environmental and economic barriers. Accordingly, they developed an incentive-based approach by integrating human learning and machine learning into a coherent framework. They have shown that food allergen management could be improved by developing more intelligent food traceability technologies that use machine learning to support operational improvements.

This research lays out an interdisciplinary framework to involve all the relevant stakeholders in the development of advanced food traceability technologies, more effective regulations, and better food safety culture for improving food allergen management collaboratively.

Please find the article in the following link: Jia, L. & Evans, S. Improving food allergen management in food manufacturing: An incentive-based approach. Food Control.

Lili Jia and Steve Evans would like to thank the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) for providing financial support to conduct this research, and the FSA Fellows who provided helpful comments and feedback.

Article by Dr Lili Jia.

Image: pixabay.com