The $15m investment in the Global Food Safety Center north of Beijing in Huairou, China includes analytical chemistry and microbiology laboratories, interactive training labs and a conference auditorium.
It will employ 30 people working on food safety research and training plus sabbatical positions open to academic and regulatory researchers.
Food safety risk portfolio
Harold Schmitz, chief science officer at Mars, said the food safety risk portfolio has changed during the past few decades.
“The Global Food Safety Center idea crystalized as the food safety risk portfolio changed during the past few decades,” he told FoodQualityNews.
“Today, the world’s largest manufacturers like Mars and Nestlé are multi-nationals and the supply chains are global, we live in a truly global world. A few decades ago it was more a regional supply chain in terms of risk portfolio which was what we grew up with.
“In practical terms, this means the microbiological risk or chemicals in the raw material stream are from what the world can offer in terms of each particular region.
“As the risk portfolio is different than 10 years ago the best way to address it was to build the center to be pre-competitive and open to the public and cross sector.
“The supply chain is from the crop, to the harvest, the factory into the product, we can’t just think of Salmonella as an individual problem or any other food safety risk separately. We need to understand the microbiological community to prevent outbreaks and make the food supply chain safer.”
Mars said 95% of the work will be pre-competitive to help the industry better evolve food safety and security.
The firm uses seven million tons of raw materials annually and is active in the food, drink, confectionery and pet food industries.
The competitive advantage
Schmitz said the aim is to advance science, technology and education in food safety.
“The work will be put in the public domain, Mars pays for the research and the work on it, but the competition is not in helping farmers grow better trees or get higher quality crops, the competitive advantage is in the way we make the products which is proprietary,” he said.
“Global is in there [the title] as a specific intent, to serve the world, it could have ended up anywhere which has an active large consumer mass. North America or Europe or the other end of Asia, there were a number of factors including the economic and interest of people we talked to.
“China has its food safety issues but it is a global problem, if you look at the US it has food safety issues, Western Europe and India also, if you step back and accurately assess global food safety incidents you will see that.
“There will be certain advances that will happen locally due to the fact we are in China and Asia and due to the demographics that will impact a lot of people. It will evolve, it offers good lab space for microbiological and chemical perspectives but how they will evolve, time will tell.”
Grant Reid, president and CEO of Mars, said: “Food safety is a global issue that concerns us all—business, governments, academics and the world’s population.
“Working together across all disciplines is the only way we can truly advance efforts at scale, with the ultimate goal of increasing access to safe nutrition for billions of people around the world.”
The World Food Programme (WFP), the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Partnership for Aflatoxin Control in Africa (PACA), and the IBM/Mars Consortium for Sequencing the Food Supply Chain are among the partnerships to solve the challenge of feeding a global population expected to grow to nine billion by 2050.
Lab facilities
The center is projected to welcome people from universities, government regulators, foundations and other companies.
“It is mandatory to have an interaction of some sort between companies and the government to work together and have cross sector collaboration to understand the latest science and how that can be applied in food safety,” said Schmitz.
“The lab will be as well-equipped as any lab focused on food safety research. It will have the latest mass spectrometry such as LC/MS and GC/MS and genomics capability and PCR will be in there.
“Having said that, it is a limited facility which depends upon making an impact through collaborative networks around the world. If there is something a university in Germany for example has, and we don’t, we would look to collaborate instead of building another building.”
David Crean, VP of corporate R&D at Mars, said unlike an R&D or innovation center focused on product development and improvement, it is for food safety research through collaboration and the pre-competitive sharing of information.
“We firmly believe that in order to ensure generations of families have access to safe and nutritious food, we must work together to evolve food safety management programs and create robust, sustainable supply chains.”