ABSTRACT
Large agro-food industries have taken an active role with respect to the application of QRA to promote decision making in safety management from the perspective of production. This fact has been fundamentally motivated by institutional pressure and the recognition of the economic and social repercussion of failures related to food safety. As a result of this change in attitude, the first applications of QRA appeared in the processes of large industries (Petrovich, 2000). Traditionally, in particular Quantitative Microbiological Risk Assessment (QMRA), has focussed principally on assessing the risk to consumers’ health to make decisions about food safety objectives showing compliance with regulatory and customer requirements (USDA, 2000; European Commission, 2002; FDA/USDA, 2003; FDA/USDA, 2005). In addition, the primary focus of risk assessment to date has been to consider risks associated with the entire industry and broad groups of products. Moreover, most risk assessment of food has been by government agencies on broad policy issues. In fact, some proponents feel that QMRA should be limited to these broad evaluations. However, the question of application level should be viewed in relation to the reason for conducting risk assessment, i.e. to provide information sufficient to make informed risk-management decisions e.g. riskinformed decisions concerning the choice of critical control points, critical limits, etc., which are largely
plant specific. Thus, the usefulness of broad, industrywide risk assessments is severely limited (Buchanan & Whiting, 1998).
