As we all would likely agree, the food safety industry is not an industry ripe with opportunity for aspiring male, female, or other models. Not unless, of course, you are a scientific and mathematical food safety model, designed to predict when food products might make people sick.

Indeed, in recent years, the concept of scientific food safety modeling has made many inroads into industry, and is becoming more accepted and used by food companies generally when making food safety handling, storage, and shelf-life decisions. What is less certain, however, is whether the use of scientific modeling (or, frankly, the non-use of scientific modeling) can lead to enhanced food company liability.

About the same time you receive this blog in your email inbox on Monday morning, I will be serving as a member of a panel at the International Association of Food Protection (IAFP) annual conference in Toronto, Canada, discussing the issue of microbial modeling and food industry liability. The session, titled “Microbial Modeling for Food Safety: What are Some of the Liability Issues?,” explores the current existing and potential use of modeling in Ready-To-Eat (RTE) and other food products. While microbial modeling was first developed more than 100 years ago to improve the predictability of safety for canned and other thermally-processed products, its more recent expansion has been driven by advancements by industry in research and development and food safety, and by regulatory oversight bodies such as USDA and FDA.

So, what if a company processed a product pursuant to a model that predicted the method of production would render the product safe, and the model proved to be untrue or unreliable? Or, what if a company produced a product without knowing about (and inconsistent with) and existing model and product was thus rendered unsafe. Or, finally, what if a company produced a product with an unintentional but known deviation from a food safety control, and turned to scientific modeling to determine whether that product was safe (and thus could be released) or unsafe (and was thus required to be reconditioned or destroyed)?

In each of these scenarios, there could be potential significant liability exposure for a food company depending upon the ultimate result of its reliance, or non-reliance, on the chosen scientific food safety model. If the result from following a model that proved to be unreliable necessitates a recall or causes consumer illness, the company’s commercial customers and /or consumers could threaten or bring lawsuits. The same would be true if a recall was necessitated or consumers became ill because: (1) the company produced a defective product not realizing that there was a model which, if followed, would have rendered the product safe; or (2) if the company’s application of an existing model to determine whether a defective product was safe for release was erroneous. In each instance, lawsuits would likely follow.

Thus, as you continue to strive to excel in the food safety scientific space, be sure to constantly quiz yourself on whether there are scientific models available which are relevant to your products and, if so, whether they are being applied (when applied) correctly.

This advice is also important because, just like me, most food safety professionals are probably not “cover-model” worthy — and, as a result, we probably shouldn’t quit our food safety day jobs.

Modeling for liability in food safety

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