Prevent food allergy alerts: an incentive-based approach

The majority of UK food recalls are due to allergen mislabelling, misleading allergen claims and/or the unintentional presence of allergens – representing a significant food safety risk and cost to industry. Labelling legislation must be followed to ensure food is safe and what it says it is, and this requires good allergen management and accurate allergen information communication down the supply chain. Distilling this information accurately, to inform labelling and/or communication of allergen information, can be particularly challenging for small to medium food businesses due to the low adoption of advanced labelling technology. In November 2018, a joint FSA/EIT (European Institute of Innovation & Technology) workshop discussed potential solutions to tackling the increase in food allergen mislabelling incidents. It was concluded that the situation could be improved by developing accessible and affordable tools for food businesses, to aid in the automation of food data collection, validation and management. As a result, the FSA are funding this initial development project that aims to develop an online system targeted at small and medium-sized food businesses, to help reduce the number of product recalls due to allergen mislabelling. The tool is also predicted to support more reliable knowledge transfer and incident tracking when things do go wrong.