Farm database eyed to improve food safety

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The future of food safety might include using big data to monitor challenges.

Third-party audits and Produce Safety Rule compliance checks ensure that food safety rules are followed.

Amanda Deering, clinical associate professor of food science at Purdue University, posed a question: “What if we took the information in these audits and put it in a searchable database by farm?”

“Say there’s an outbreak and you can trace it back to a particular farm, then we could look at the audit reports and see where there were possible food safety fails,” she said during a Purdue Data Driven webinar. “The goal would be to have a correlation between outbreaks and fails to identify the key areas that could lead to an outbreak.”

Audits and inspections include cleaning and sanitizing records, worker training, record keeping, traceability, water testing, environmental monitoring, verification and more.

Deering shared hypothetical benefits of a food safety database:

• Understand commodity-specific challenges to maintain food safety.

• Go beyond Good Agricultural Practices and create a customizable approach to food safety.

• Identify practices that are more likely to result in illness if consumed.

• Provide more information to assist with traceability and recalls.

If food safety data could be switched to a digital format, accessibility would be easier.

“This would have to be done very carefully and thought through very well before it could be a possibility,” Deering said. “But there’s a ton of information sitting there that we could use to help improve food safety in produce.”

For more information about digital agriculture, visit https://ag.purdue.edu/digitalag/.