Food safety

The term Food safety born in English and in Italian it takes on a double meaning.

Where it refers to access, availability and distribution of food, as well as food hygiene and compliance with labeling and consumer information requirements.

The first meaning comes from the definition provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations: "to ensure that all people and at all times have sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and dietary preferences for an active and healthy life"; this amounts to a cautionary statement against poverty and an address to nations that food is an important resource for world social stability and to take action to ensure that food is available and accessible.

This compares to the second meaning of food safety. Every year, in Europe alone, 23 million people fall ill and about 5,000 die from food diseases.

Unsafe food can lead to serious or prolonged illness, hospitalization and even death. A variety of bacteria, viruses, parasites and chemical hazards have potentially serious consequences not only for human health, but also for the economy and the environment.

It is estimated that the most frequent causes of foodborne illnesses are diarrhea agents.

The most common is norovirus, followed by Campylobacter spp. Salmonella spp., Campylobacter spp., Listeria monocytogenes cause most of the deaths. All of this points to the need to strengthen foodborne disease prevention, surveillance and management, including risk communication, consumer awareness and education.

If on the one hand there is the damage created to the consumer, for the Company the economic impact of the lack of food safety is equally significant. More often than not, the delay in identifying the problem, its source and the incomplete traceability of the corrupted batches produces the massive recall of the goods and a strong negative impact on the brand.

With the aim of mitigating these negative economic effects, we propose a series of kits that can be easily used in the internal control laboratories of companies or in third-party laboratories, reducing the times for controls and the release of the produced batches.

A selection of kits dedicated to the genetic testing of meat, fish, milk, and their derivatives is available and their use will allow efficiencies to be made to the controls applied to production chains and in the detection of tainted matter in raw materials, semi-finished products and finished products.