TThere are thousands of foods available on the market, with thousands of brands and hundreds of potential hazards in the food chain. Where do you start?
People eat different things on different days, and different people have very different eating habits, not least during holiday seasons. This is natural variability in people's habits and has to be handled in a food safety or benefits assessment. This natural variability is different to uncertainty in that it is not a measurement error and can not be reduced by further measurements. It is a natural effect of people's choices. This variability is included in an exposure assessment if the full food consumption survey is considered in the analysis.
Food consumption surveys are large data sets that take into account the populations' habits over a period of time, including gathering data from different seasons to take into account people's changing eating habits in different seasons.
An effective food safety assessment system should allow you to manage the complexity in the wide range of foods on the market via a food grouping mechanism. Food groups are lists of foods with similar properties either in terms of their composition or their chemical hazard probabilities.
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