Selection of critical factors for identifying emerging food safety risks in dynamic food production chains

A pro-active emerging risk identification system starts with the selection of critical factors related to the occurrence of emerging hazards. This paper describes a method to derive the most important factors in dynamic production chains starting from a gross list of critical factors. The method comprised the semi-quantitative evaluation of the critical factors for a relatively novel product on the Dutch market and a related traditional product. This method was tested in an expert study with three case studies. The use of group discussion followed by individual ranking in an expert study proved to be a powerful tool in identifying the most important factors for each case. Human behaviour (either producers' behaviour or human knowledge) was the most important factor for all three cases. The expert study showed that further generalization of critical factors based on product characteristics may be possible.