The food industry is one of the largest employers by sector in the U.S., accounting for over $2.25 trillion in revenue. Food contamination can occur anywhere along the food production line, from farm to fork, including production, harvest, distribution systems and storage facilities, processing plants, retail locations, and during home preparation. In order to address food safety concerns, technological innovation and implementation must accelerate. Transformative innovations require multidisciplinary research that engages engineers, scientists, and policy experts from a variety of disciplines. The goal of this workshop is to create a multidisciplinary task force that will identify key challenges in food safety monitoring and discuss recent technological advances in engineering in order to provoke innovative approaches to increase food safety and prevent disaster. We will accomplish these goals by bringing together experts and researchers from industry, government labs, and academia to assemble interdisciplinary teams to productively address current shortcomings and implement innovative technological solutions. These research teams will include experts in food microbiology, materials science, chemical sensing, biosensing, automation, and data fusion. The scope of the workshop will be to analyze the farm-to-fork system and to identify the key research and technology needs to help streamline food safety monitoring thereby optimizing production and delivery of safe foods in a globally interconnected system. The foci will be on food safety regulations, current challenges in product testing, innovations in sample concentration and processing technologies, and novel transducer and biosensor technologies. By the workshop conclusion, discussions provoked by the union of multidisciplinary working groups will direct future research priorities and provide the foundation for an interdisciplinary field of Food Sensing.
A workshop on "Novel Sampling and Sensing Methods for Improving Food Safety" was co-organized by faculty at the Georgia Tech Research Institute Agricultural Technology Research Program, the University of Georgia, Center for Food Safety and Georgia Institute of Technology in June 2011. The program consisted of two days of presentations, break-out discussions and a poster session. The format of the workshop has been designed to encourage dialog between individuals with diverse scientific backgrounds to enable the cross-pollination of ideas and stimulate the development of collaborative multidisciplinary teams that will advance the field for improved food safety. The technical focus on food safety included aspects of product testing pertaining to sample preparation and sensing methodologies for the detection of pathogenic bacteria, viruses, toxins and parasites important for food safety (chemical contaminants were also discussed, but to a lesser extent). The opening session provided a discussion of the state-of-the-art and context for current and future needs in developing novel methodologies for rapid and/or real-time detection of food contaminants. The breakout groups focused on two subject areas: sample pre-concentration and sensing (transducer technologies). Particular emphasis was placed on new methods that are rapid and/or high throughput and capable of multiplexing. Attendance data for the workshop is shown in the table below, and students were encouraged to attend. An abstract booklet was printed with two page abstracts for each of the presentations and 35 posters presented. The post workshop feedback was very supportive indicating that the multi-disciplinary nature of the workshop was of value, and that attendees felt it was important to continue providing these opportunities for cross discipline collaboration. Attendance numbers for the workshop Academic Professionals 58 Industry Professionals 15 Federal and State Agency Professionals 16 Students 43 Total 132 The key technical findings of the workshop were: (1) Research should address specific emerging novel technology applications with interdisciplinary teams, (2) Support for collaboration and training in food safety sampling and sensing should be made available, (3) Support for infrastructure for food safety sampling and sensing is critical, (4) Engaging industry, federal and university components for effective dialog at workshops to develop strategies on how to move forward is important, and (5) The targeting of specific applications for the demonstration of feasibility in model systems is a worthwhile undertaking.
