March 22: The New Standards of Food Safety
According to Sylvain Charlebois, Associate Dean of the College of Management and Economics, the new normal in food and agriculture will demand more collaboration between stakeholders. Competing businesses will need to share data and costs, as well as build strategies set on converging interests. In the end, effective food traceability methods will rely heavily on increased teamwork among former rivals.
The new normal presents a number of fascinating issues to contend with, among them: designing comprehensive strategies in the field to effectively cope with climate change and the question of economic trends, subsidies and currency wars, as well as ever changing federal regulations on food packaging, labelling, and safety and trade negotiations.
While the food system has solved many aspects of traceability, significant challenges remain to provide cost-effective protocols for market assurance, and product improvement. Based on economics alone, the time to improve our systems will be set by consumers, and nobody else.