The purpose of this white paper is to underline the importance of proactive and preventive strategies for industrial food safety management, to emphasize the value of combining genomic data analytics and machine learning with conventional microbiological monitoring and the potential pathways to securing both improved operational performance and better regulatory compliance/public health outcomes using such approaches.
About the Author
Professor John O’Brien is Founder and Director of The Food Observatory, UK. Formerly, CEO of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland and subsequently Leader of the Food Safety & Integrity Research Program at Nestlé, his experience spans the international food industry from senior technical leadership positions in Groupe Danone (France) and Nestlé (Switzerland) to various consultancy and advisory projects in Ireland, Europe, Japan and USA. In his Nestlé role, he had responsibility for leading the global technical competence centre in food safety and quality at the Nestle Research Centre in Lausanne.
O’Brien holds/has held non-executive directorships of several technical organisations including ILSI (Washington), IFSH (Chicago), ILSI Europe (Brussels, as Chair), and Campden BRI (UK). He currently serves as a member of the Science Council of the Food Standards Agency (London), where he chaired the Working Group on Global Food System Risks, and is a Visiting Professor and Chair of the Advisory Board at the Nutrition Innovation Centre for Food & Health (NICHE) at Ulster University, Northern Ireland. He has a PhD in Food Chemistry (University College, Cork) and an MSc in Toxicology with Distinction (University of Surrey).
