Risk-benefit analysis (RBAs) is an emerging topic in the area of food safety. More often food safety authorities, industry, producers and consumers are realizing that a unilateral focus on only risks or only benefits associated with the consumption of food products and diet choices is insufficient.  Decisions and policy considerations need to be made balancing the adverse and beneficial health effects for a certain food, food component, or intervention. RBAs are by design multi-disciplinary approaches, bringing together diverse experts such as nutritionists, epidemiologists, modelers, toxicologists and microbiologists in a comprehensive assessment that weighs the potential benefits and risks of the case at hand. In the recent years, frameworks like Benefit–Risk Analysis for Foods or BRAFO, and tools like QALIBRA have been developed, although they haven’t been widely used yet. This symposium will hopefully be the first of a series of technical discussions that will resume the debate of RBAs in the area of food safety and propel the field forward. The symposium will present the current state of the art in RBAs, as well as a free online tool, QALIBRA, and how RBAs can be applied to both populations and individuals. A study using multi-criteria decision analysis in RBA will be also presented. To achieve this objective, we propose four presentations of 25 minutes each and a final 20-minute section for questions and answers.

Presentations