Awareness, alert and response for cb threats in food defence

The food chain is a sector that is vulnerable particularly to being jeopardised both by accidental events of contamination and intentional threat attacks. Since these incidents in most cases have cross-border impacts, effective collaboration among a wide range of international stakeholders is required to prevent where possible, or otherwise cope with these challenges. Unfortunately, at the European level, efficient tools for the identification and analysis, response and communication, and appropriate mitigation of, in particular, foodborne chemical (C) and biological (B) threats are either limited, or completely absent.The vision of the REACTION project is to increase Europe’s resilience towards foodborne chemical and biological (CB) threats. While in the food safety and food security arena, a significant number of successful international projects and initiatives are already underway, we believe that the food defence sector urgently requires additional attention. Our overall goal is to strengthen Europe’s food defence capability to respond to intentional malicious attacks, through (a) the development of a data-driven monitoring tool for food defence, (b) the development a cost-efficient and streamlined CB threat identification pipeline, (c) the development of AI-supported food defence management tool, (d) the creation of a European-led International Food Defence Expert Forum, and (e) the design of an information awareness raising campaign for CB threats. REACTION is driven by an experienced consortium of 14 leading European Institutes, Universities (including SSH experts), national food safety and defence authorities, agri-food chain representatives, as well as technology providers, who will cooperate with an International Advisory Board of world-class actors from the food defence arena.