Planning laboratory support for control and monitoring of food safety: Developing methodological approaches within the risk-based model

Multiple and considerably diverse food products are in turnover on the consumer market in Russia; therefore, it is very important to efficiently protect the county population from negative impacts exerted by violation of sanitary-epidemiological requirements to food safety and quality. This determined the relevance of the present study.
The aim of this study is to propose some ways to improve approaches to planning laboratory support for control / monitoring of food products based on the principle that the laboratory test structure
should be as relevant to the structure of health risks for consumers as only possible.

We took data from the branch statistical Report Form No. 18 Data on Sanitary Situation in RF Region (section 8) over 2014–2023; data provided in the Laboratory Support module of the Rospotrebnadzor’s Unified Information and Analytical System; Rosstat data on the population number and consumed quantities of some food products.

The developed approaches make it possible to establish minimal sufficient quantities of food samples from different risk groups taken for control / monitoring considering acceptable frequency of violations of safety requirements and the permissible margin of error, which is fixed most strictly for objects of extremely high and high risk.

Insufficient quantity of food samples taken for analysis has been shown to decrease the confidence level of the test results. A 5 % decline in the number of taken samples against the calculated minimal sufficient quantity decreases the upper confidence limit of the sample by 1.8 %. We have established that currently some regions take an insufficient number of samples and thereby obtain the results, which have 50–87 % confidence limit instead of required 90 % and above.

The approach has been tested in a specific region as an example; as a result, it is deemed advisable to adjust the structure of laboratory support for control / monitoring of meat products in order to bring it to conformity with the structure of potential health risks for consumers.

Basic trends in further development of the proposed approach including considering quality indicators in test planning and creating risk profiles for specific sub-categories of food products. This should include a wider range of indicators that describe law-abidance and / or ‘risk potential’ of economic entities involved in food turnover, prices, demand for a product and volumes of sales etc.