Network analysis: a promising tool for food safety

•A network analysis tool allows rapid interrogation of large databases.•The ‘live tool’ is capable of automatic or manual data download.•It comes as a desktop application allowing regular data updates.•Data mining is by network analysis or descriptive statistics.•Outputs come as network maps or charts for reporting.

Global challenges in food safety include a range of concerns: (i) persistent long-term issues such as heavy metals in seafood, (ii) emerging incidents such as a particular food contaminant (e.g. melamine), (iii) the apparent growth in food fraud, and (iv) the effectiveness of regulation and enforcement policies and their implementation across nations/borders. Food testing, a key unifying theme across these concerns, produces enormous databases of confirmed or suspected food and animal feed issues across the globe. In a resource-constrained environment, food safety officials would benefit from advanced data-mining applications to optimise use of the rich information these databases contain. This report overviews the network analysis approach which allows rapid interrogation of large databases to identify trends in nations detecting and producing faulty foods.