1. Food safety: from control to culture

1.1 First steps towards food safety

Food quality and safety have been central concerns of the food industry for over 70 years.

The first quality approaches appeared in the 1950s, with theories on quality management recognized as having made a major contribution to improving the quality of Japanese products. Dr. Deming and other researchers developed Total Quality Management (TQM) systems, which implement an approach to improving quality during production while lowering costs.

These approaches were mainly based on quality control of raw materials on receipt, in-process and finished products. Towards the end of the last century, these control-based approaches gave way to more sophisticated quality approaches based on ISO 9000 standards....