Methods for Identifying and Mitigating Vulnerable Nodes in a Food Process

Introduction: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) quantifies the consequences and risks of chemical and biological terrorism attacks on the national food supply chain via the biennial Chemical Terrorism Risk Assessment (CTRA), and Biological Terrorism Risk Assessment (BTRA). The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which became law in 2011, addresses the use of mitigation strategies to protect food from intentional adulteration by microbes or chemicals. Hence, calculating the health effects of chemical and biological adulterants in foods, is an area of common interest between CTRA, BTRA, FSMA, and industry.

Purpose: The CTRA and BTRA consider national and local impacts; their Desktop Tool software contains useful agent data, but the embedded food processes are too generic for one company to use for mitigation of risk. A collaboration between CSAC, ADM, and FPDI to address industry needs on a per-process basis resulted in the stand-alone, downloadable Intentional Adulteration Assessment Tool (IAAT) software package.

Methods: The health effects of adulterant in a batch of food were compared using CTRA and BTRA Desktop Tools and IAAT. Food processing details were entered into IAAT and the effect of various mitigation strategies on the health effects were calculated.

Results: CTRA and BTRA report the health effects on a national or city level, and the recall of a product is a major variable in the total number of illnesses. The IAAT gives the potential health effects for the batch size, based upon the locus of adulterant addition within the process. The IAAT gives the producer the ability to restrict physical access to vulnerable locations, and hence the opportunity to analyze and remove risk from the manufacturing process.

Significance: Food producers can use the IAAT to analyze the risk within their own unique processes and focus mitigation strategies where needed.