Do Food Safety Alerts Speak the Same Language?
Why AI makes it easier to connect public alerts, but does not automatically make their information comparable or useful for prevention. Imagine that you are responsible for food safety in a company buying ingredients from different countries. You want [...]
The Questions I Keep Coming Back To
From metadata and open knowledge to AI: revisiting twenty years of assumptions about how we share and use information. In 2005, Professor Manolis Stavrakakis, teaching viticulture at the Agricultural University of Athens, asked me a question that ended up influencing [...]
Is There Such a Thing as a Food Safety Commons?
About a decade ago, Paul Stacey gave me a copy of David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner. At the time, I was already convinced of the value of making knowledge openly accessible, discoverable and reusable. Much of my academic research [...]
A Different Kind of Growth
For eighteen years, Agroknow was more than the name of a company. It was the place where we tested a conviction: that if we could collect, clean, connect, and interpret the enormous amount of fragmented information around food and agriculture, [...]
All food and agriculture data – interconnected at last?
A 10-year reflection on interoperability, promises kept, and lessons learned In October 2016, just before the ODI Summit in London, I was interviewed by Hannah Foulds, who at the time was working at the Open Data Institute (ODI). She asked [...]
“Just ask the system what you need”
Food safety is not short on data. What it has always struggled with is how humans interact with that data under pressure — audits, incidents, regulatory changes, and operational constraints that leave little room for experimentation. That tension was the [...]
“My insurance should pay for AI”
The recent Global Crisis Management Summit Americas (GCMS'24) illuminated a fascinating nexus - the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI), food safety, and insurance dynamics. Amidst the diverse array of discussions and dialogues, one prevailing theme emerged; the expectation among some [...]
AI in Food Safety: exploring the promise & understanding the pitfalls
In the realm of food safety, the landscape seems to be ever-evolving. I do hear the persistent concerns regarding the efficacy of traditional methods in risk mitigation and compliance assurance. From the challenges faced by FS/QA teams to the need [...]
I’ve asked ChatGPT for this article
You have probably already heard or read about ChatGPT, the AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. According to Wikipedia, its name "ChatGPT" combines "Chat", referring to its chatbot functionality, and "GPT", which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a type of large [...]
Tech Podcast on AI for food safety: reflecting on FDA’s key takeaways
A few months ago, I joined Maria Velissariou (Mars) and Cronan McNamara (Creme Global) for a Smarter Food Safety TechTalk Podcast hosted by Donald A. Prater & Frank Yiannas (FDA). The question that we tried to answer seemed to be [...]
Using AI to boost supplier & ingredient risk assessment
Let's talk about food risk assessment. The process through which food safety or supplier compliance teams need to calculate a risk indicator for thousands of ingredients and hundreds of suppliers, so that they rank them in terms of priority and [...]
How can AI revolutionize traditional horizon scanning?
There are different ways in which food safety teams can stay informed about what is happening out there that could be critical for their supply chain. For example, regularly checking official, trusted websites like the European RASFF portal and the [...]
“By accelerating food risk predictions, we improve strategy & help society”
How can AI and predictive analytics contribute to food safety? This is a question I keep asking myself and my colleagues for a long time now, trying to comprehend the versatility of food safety predictive analytics and find new ways [...]
Top 5 food risks to expect this summer
Food companies want to avoid major incidents, be more proactive and less reactive in their food risk mitigation actions. They also want to increase the amount of data that they can have access to, in order to be able [...]
We Need to Talk About Lettuce
Oh dear green salad. Do still people get sick from contaminated leafy greens? Last year, the Canadian Public Health Agency officially asked consumers to avoid consuming romaine lettuce, until their investigation of some serious illness incidents was completed. During the [...]