Discover how Holifood researchers are translating key findings into policy recommendations.
Holistic artificial intelligence for food safety
Main takeaways:
- AI can support food safety decision-making.
- Food safety requires a holistic food systems perspective.
- Integrated, large-scale datasets are essential for holistic AI.
- Holistic AI models can predict contaminant risks.
- AI in food safety operates within an evolving EU legal framework.
- Trustworthiness, explainability and data governance are central.
Next-generation detection technologies for food safety
Main takeaways:
- Emerging food safety risks are increasing due to climate change, globalisation, and changing consumption patterns.
- Traditional targeted monitoring systems are insufficient to detect complex and emerging hazards.
- Metagenomics, AI-supported analytics, and rapid diagnostics can significantly strengthen early warning and prevention capacities.
- Regulatory and validation frameworks for innovative detection technologies remain underdeveloped at EU level.
- Better alignment between regulation, risk assessment, and scientific innovation is needed to support implementation at scale.
- Integrated and interoperable EU data infrastructures are essential for predictive and risk-based food safety systems.
Managing Trade-offs in Food Systems: How holistic risk assessment can support better policy decisions
Main takeaways:
- Food policy decisions increasingly involve trade-offs between food safety, nutrition, environmental sustainability and economic feasibility.
- Assessing risks in isolation may lead to unintended consequences elsewhere in the food system.
- Holistic risk assessment provides a structured framework for evaluating these trade-offs and supporting more balanced policy decisions.
- Different policy questions require different combinations of assessment methods and levels of analytical integration.
- A tiered approach allows evidence to be adapted to the policy context, available data and resources.
- Early collaboration between policymakers, risk assessors and experts from multiple disciplines is essential for transparent and effective decision-making.
Engaging citizens in emerging food safety risks: improving risk communication and identification
Main takeaways:
- Citizens tend to perceive emerging food safety risks, particularly those linked to climate change, as psychologically distant and less personally relevant than risks with immediate and observable effects.
- Perceptions were broadly consistent across the countries studied, although some demographic differences were identified, including lower perceived risk among men.
- Risk communication should make emerging food safety risks more personally relevant by connecting risk drivers, such as climate change, with local impacts and concrete, actionable behaviours.
- A portfolio of communication mechanisms is needed to ensure that emerging food safety risk information reaches the wider population.
- Citizen science can complement formal surveillance by providing observations relevant to emerging threats, but its early-warning value depends on effective verification and integration into institutional response and surveillance systems.
- Social-media analytics can support the identification of emerging public concerns and inform risk communication, but social-media data are not
representative of the wider population.