New Food Ingredients: The Challenge of Potential New Pathogens and Spoilage Issues

The UN Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger) highlights the need to produce sufficient food commodities to meet the world's population demands and combat hunger, while also respecting the environment and adhering to sustainability principles. Since the beginning of the 21st century, new ideas, ingredients, and technologies have emerged that could significantly transform the food industry. These transformations may alter the rules of food production by integrating traditional knowledge with new technologies and scientific advancements. These innovative processes align to feed the world's growing population through sustainable production. The introduction of new ingredients in food products may necessitate new food safety and/or quality requirements. Using several examples of both traditional and new ingredients such as insects, plants, marine plants, mycoproteins, meat crops, cellulose, and chitin (as representative examples), we illustrate the need to determine which microorganisms to look for when it comes to the microbiological quality and safety of such food products. This opinion does not seek to establish new microbiological guidelines or standards for safety and quality. Instead, our goal is to emphasize the need for a process to define new microbiological criteria, ensuring the quality and safety of emerging food products.