Combining Quantitative Risk Assessment of Human Health, Food Waste, and Energy Consumption: The Next Step in the Development of the Food Cold Chain?

This study focuses on the cold chain of cooked ham, including transport, cold room in supermarket, display cabinet, transport by consumer, and domestic refrigerator, and aims to predict the risk for human health associated withListeria monocytogenes, the amount of food wasted due to the growth of spoilage bacteria, and the electrical consumption to maintain product temperature through the cold chain. A set of eight intervention actions were tested to evaluate their impact on the three criteria. Results show that the modification of the thermostat of the domestic refrigerator has a high impact on food safety and food waste and a limited impact on the electrical consumption. Inversely, the modification of the airflow rate in the display cabinet has a high impact on electrical consumption and a limited impact on food safety and food waste. A cost –benefit analysis approach and two multicriteria decision analysis methods were used to rank the intervention actions. These three methodologies show that setting the thermostat of the domestic refrigerator to 4 °C presents the best compromise between the three criteria. The impact of decisionmak er preferences (criteria weight) and limitations of these three approaches are discussed. The approaches proposed by this study may be useful in decision making to evaluate global impact of intervention actions in issues involving conflicting outputs.

Source: Risk Analysis - September 27, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Steven Duret, Hong ‐Minh Hoang, Evelyne Derens‐Bertheau, Anthony Delahaye, Onrawee Laguerre, Laurent Guillier Tags: Original Research Article Source Type: research