AI Helped Cargill Avoid 41 Food Safety Incidents
Key Highlights
- Cargill developed its own Hazard Alert System after a costly locust bean gum recall, using AI to connect dispersed data and prevent future incidents.
- AI helps companies like Chick-fil-A monitor microbial risks in real-time, focusing on predictive analytics rather than traditional testing methods.
- Industry leaders emphasize that AI amplifies human expertise, enabling better risk-based decision-making rather than replacing human judgment.
Artificial intelligence-assisted technologies helped Cargill avoid 41 food safety incidents in the past year a half, Cargill’s top food safety officer told an audience at May’s Food Safety Summit.
A November 2020 recall of locust bean gum – “the most expensive recall of my 25-year career” – helped push Cargill into developing its own Cargill Hazard Alert System, said Sean Leighton, global vice president of food safety, quality, and regulatory at the giant meat and ingredients company.
He was speaking on a panel discussion, “Leveraging AI for food safety: From strategy to impact,” that opened the Food Safety Summit on May 12. Other speakers were from McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, FDA, North Carolina State University and University of Illinois.
“How do you react to something that hasn’t happened yet?” Leighton said was the central question in putting AI to work to prevent food safety incidents.
Six years ago, signals that could have indicated that locust bean gum was contaminated with ethylene oxide were out there, he said, but they were faint and dispersed. If anyone could have read the tea leaves and connected the dots, Cargill could have avoided a multi-million-dollar global recall of ingredients containing the texturant.
“Who owns this data?” Leighton asked, saying some of the data in that recall and others resides with R&D, some with Cargill’s agricultural traders, some with regulatory affairs and sales & commercial teams. There was lots of data and it was spread among different departments. No one person could have read it all, seen the connections and determined what it meant.
But an AI system could, Leighton said, and now Cargill has one.
“Can we continue to rely on yesterday’s approach to manage tomorrow’s risks?” asked Cindy Jiang, retired senior director of global food safety risk management for the global supply chain of McDonald's Corp. “That’s where AI comes in. Not as a trend but as a practical tool for detection. Not to replace human expertise but to amplify it,” and going from reactive to proactive.
Steven Lyon, director of food safety-field operations at Chick-fil-A, also assailed the siloing of data that could prevent food safety incidents. Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment and artificial intelligence enable Chick-fil-A to monitor salmonella risks throughout its chicken supply chain, evaluating data from farm to fork.
Chick-fil-A uses the Ancera AI platform to monitor Salmonella risk in real-time, focusing on predictive analytics rather than just testing. The process goes from siloed data to centralized data to application of AI models to AI-informed decision-making.
“AI is great for awareness, but human beings must act on it,” Lyon stressed. “AI is here to make humans better at risk-based decision-making.”
About the Author
Dave Fusaro
Editor in Chief
Dave Fusaro has served as editor in chief of Food Processing magazine since 2003. Dave has 30 years experience in food & beverage industry journalism and has won several national ASBPE writing awards for his Food Processing stories. Dave has been interviewed on CNN, quoted in national newspapers and he authored a 200-page market research report on the milk industry. Formerly an award-winning newspaper reporter who specialized in business writing, he holds a BA in journalism from Marquette University. Prior to joining Food Processing, Dave was Editor-In-Chief of Dairy Foods and was Managing Editor of Prepared Foods.