What risk assessments can tell us about setting criteria

The Food Safety Objective (FSO) paradigm has been developed as a risk-based approach to microbial food safety. To be operational, this paradigm requires that an Acceptable Level of Protection (ALOP) and a FSO be quantitatively defined. It then becomes the industry’s task to produce foods that achieve the FSO. A two-dimensional risk assessment, which separates variation and uncertainty, can help design a process or validate an existing process. If the initially proposed or existing process parameters do not meet the FSO, the sensitivity analysis can show which parameters have high uncertainty or variability that can be better controlled or how much a parameter must change for the process to achieve the FSO.