La protezione degli alimenti e i suoi aspetti applicativi: procedure di Food Defence

Food defence is a fast-growing topic in the food industry. Being food a fundamental good for human survival, the food supply chain should be protected from unwanted manipulations such as terrorist attacks, where malicious individuals or organizations can turn food processing steps to weapons aimed to threaten public health. Food protection strategies are crucial to help food organizations to (i) protect themselves and consumers from deliberate attacks (ii) and protect their public image as a trustworthy entity. Moreover, implementing a solid food defence strategy is a key pre-requirement to fulfil with third party certification standards, as the International Featured Standard (IFS) and FSSC (Food Safety System Certification) 22000:5 among others. Despites the intrinsic difficulty to prevent attacks coming from internal employees, an active food defence process implementation can mitigate the likelihood of attacks by detecting unusual behaviours. Regrettably, still little importance is recognized to Food Defence. For instance, they are not yet neither a legal requirement, nor a prioritised topic in food organization agendas. In order to ensure an adequate food defence risk assessment and management it is necessary to raise consciousness both within the food industry experts and the consumers. From the food industry point of view, it is noticeable that preventing attacks to happen may save the financial cost of conducting a legal cause in the case of a deliberate attack from a terrorist, and it is a far better option than crisis management once an attack has already been committed. On the other hand, from the consumer point of view, it’s about the non-negotiable requirements of health and safety. Aim of this work is (i) to inform about food defence risk assessment and management to mitigate both unintentional and intentional attacks and (ii) to provide a checklist that can help the food industry to ensure food supply chain integrity and safety. ​