Frontiers of machine learning in smart food safety

Integration of machine learning (ML) technologies into the realm of smart food safety represents a rapidly evolving field with significant potential to transform the management and assurance of food quality and safety. This chapter will discuss the capabilities of ML across different segments of the food supply chain, encompassing pre-harvest agricultural activities to post-harvest processes and delivery to the consumers. Three specific examples of applying cutting-edge ML to advance food science are detailed in this chapter, including its use to improve beer flavor, using natural language processing to predict food safety incidents, and leveraging social media to detect foodborne disease outbreaks. Despite advances in both theory and practice, application of ML to smart food safety still suffers from issues such as data availability, model reliability, and transparency. Solving these problems can help realize the full potential of ML in food safety. Development of ML in smart food safety is also driven by social and industry impacts. The improvement and implementation of legal policies brings both opportunities and challenges. The future of smart food safety lies in the strategic implementation of ML technologies, navigating social and industry impacts, and adapting to regulatory changes in the AI era.