Use of statistical methods to assess food safety

Statistical methods are widely used in the food industry to asses food safety. Major applications of statistical methods can be found in the design of sampling plans, in the analysis of data and in process control strategies. The major trend in food safety policy goes towards process- and system control instead of performing food examination at the end of the food processing chain. In this paper several process control strategies Like monitoring programs (Fuchs et al., 1999), Statistical Process Control (Keats and Montgomery, 1991) or HACCP to asses food safety are presented, where the focus lies on statistical techniques.