ABSTRACT
Food safety regulations impose the food and feed industry to control and ensure the safety and the traceability of their products along their production chains including production, processing, packaging, storage, transportation, and distribution to the consumers. It is important to understand the globally established production systems and processing procedures to assess the potential risks for food safety and to maintain an adequate level of protection for consumers. In the European Union (EU), this task is fulfilled by the European Food Safety Authority, which provides scientific advices on food and feed safety issues and emerging risks to the European Commission, the European Parliament, and EU Member States. Different food safety measures are thus defined for environmental contaminants to ensure an adequate level of protection of consumers. The monitoring of environmental pollution and food safety control for specific harvesting zones on a sufficiently frequent basis is required to provide confidence that chemical hazards are constantly below acceptable limits.
