“In an era marked by significant technological breakthroughs,” the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), a Coalition of Action of The Consumer Goods Forum, opened its annual conference today in Singapore with sustainability, AI and climate change as components of food safety.
Among the usual food safety topics, this year’s conference, which runs through Thursday (April 11), also is devoting sessions to:
- “Sustainability: A Pillar of Food Safety.” As the conference outline put it, “The critical intersection between food safety and food security grows ever closer … the drive for sustainable approaches to food security must always have food safety outcomes at their core, and how those two important and interrelated outcomes can align.”
- “The Role of AI in Tackling Food Fraud,” with speaker Yinqing Ma, director of the Compliance Policy Staff at the FDA.
The Consumer Goods Forum is an international organization that brings together consumer goods retailers and manufacturers to settle common issues. Its Global Food Safety Initiative works toward the continuous improvement of food safety management systems across the globe, developing a set of standards for manufacturing that help assure safe, quality foods. Regional certification programs such as Safe Quality Foods program and British Retail Consortium are patterned after its directives.
“We will focus on the challenges and opportunities that technology can bring in helping to solve the food safety concerns facing us in an ever evolving world,” said Erica Sheward, director of GFSI, “and discuss emerging issues, including the strategies the food industry will need to deploy as the impacts of climate change threaten previous, tried-and-tested approaches to food safety management.”
