PERSPECTIVES ON THE EU FOOD INDUSTRY'S SAFETY AND QUALITY: DEVELOPMENTS AND CHALLENGES

This paper summarizes how the food industry is becoming more customer-oriented to deliver safe products for consumers, high quality products to maintain customer satisfaction to gain competitive advantage on the market and needs faster response and improvements to deal with food frauds and incidents. Is it better to put resources into identifying fraud and enforcement services or into raising public consciousness regarding the problem of food counterfeiting and fraud? How could technology be used to speed up the identification of fraud? How to anticipate problems and better understand risks? In the context of the issues discussed, consumers may show interest in issues not directly related to products but derived from their (the consumers') value system involving, e.g., requirements on origins, process organization, environmental protection or social responsibility.