The ICMSF simplified guide to understanding and using Food Safety Objectives (FSO) and Performance Objectives (PO) provides an overview on Good Practices and HACCP, setting public health goals, the concept of Appropriate Level of Protection (ALOP), the difference between an FSO, PO and Microbiological Criteria (MC), the responsibility for setting an FSO, setting a PO, responsibility for compliance with the FSO, meeting the FSO, etc.

This article provides an introduction to the concept of food safety objectives (FSO) which may make food safety transparent and quantifiable. This paper illustrates a practical overview on how to derive FSOs from population health goals, through product group health objectives. Then these FSOs can be used to assign the responsibilities over the various parts of the food chain, and within one part of the chain over the various process stages, linking finally the limits of the CCPs in HACCP to the overall public health objective. Finally, the impact of the statistical distribution of the concentration of pathogens in foods is taken into account, and how it impacts compliance to an FSO.

This presentation was part of the 2010 Food Safety Research Consortium Workshop: Assuring Safety of Imported Food. This slides cover food safety requirements for foods in international trade, the history of international microbiological criteria and a new risk management metrics vocabulary.

This article evaluates the proposed definition of Food Safety Objectives (FSOs) and their implementation from the perspective of Quantitative Microbiological Risk Assessment (QMRA). The relationship between QMRA and FSOs is illustrated by a model for the public health risk of Shiga-toxin producing Escherichia coli in steak tartare. The authors concluded that the proposed definition of FSOs needs to be modified to properly account for variability in and uncertainty about the contamination of food with pathogenic microorganisms and emphasize that both prevalence and concentration of pathogens must be considered. For this purpose, the authors proposed the P-D equivalence curve, a simple graphical tool to separate "tolerable" from "non-tolerable" combinations of prevalence and concentration (dose).

This summary report of a workshop held in April 2003 in Marseille, France explains that it is critical that food safety objectives (FSOs) be achievable by current industrial and consumer practices. Given the difficulty of using public health goals such as an appropriate level of protection (ALOP) to establish control measures, the concept of FSOs was introduced to provide meaningful guidance to food safety management in practice. The process of introducing FSOs will present a fresh challenge to the way science, government and industry interact in the future.

This contribution describes the mechanism of establishing a Food Safety Objective (FSO) from an Appropriate Level of Protection (ALOP) derived from a Microbiological Risk Analysis (MRA). It discusses further performance and process criteria applied by food processors to match the FSO – this illustrated by an example.

Here, researchers demonstrate a general methodology that allows identification of an ALOP and evaluation of corresponding metrics at appropriate points in the food chain. It requires a two-dimensional probabilistic risk assessment, the example used being the Monte Carlo QMRA for Clostridium perfringens in ready-to eat and partially cooked meat and poultry products, with minor modifications to evaluate and abstract required measures. For demonstration purposes, the QMRA model was applied specifically to hot dogs produced and consumed in the United States.

FAO/WHO convened an expert meeting in collaboration with the Federal Dairy Research Centre, Institute for Hygiene and Food Safety, Kiel, Germany, 3-7 April 2006. This expert meeting aimed to delineate the different ways in which Microbiological Risk Assessment (MRA) can contribute to the development of effective risk management strategies for implementation at different steps along the food-chain.The report describes some of the recent international activities, which included undertaking case studies and convening an expert meeting, and the outcomes of discussions on the use of Microbiological Risk Assessment (MRA) in microbiological risk management.

These papers are related to charting a new course in food safety with the development and implementation of risk-based metrics; incorporating risk-based metrics in HACCP plans; getting to grips with pathogens; practices, perception and role of risk management & risk communication. This specific bulletin is about half way down the page.