BfR-Academy Training FoodChain-Lab

Foodborne outbreak and food tracing investigations are becoming increasingly complex due to changing patterns in the global food production and supply chain network resulting in more and more complex delivery chains. In 2002 EU regulation (EC) No 178/2002 was enacted to cope with the new requirements for food safety. By this regulation traceability of food is legally required in the European Union.

FoodChain-Lab is a free open-source software providing trace back and forward analysis for food items along food supply chains, e.g. in case of foodborne disease outbreak investigations. FoodChain-Lab was developed at the BfR in research projects and is now made available for everybody who is interested.

FoodChain-Lab provides integrated data management, validation, enrichment and visualization features as well as interactive analysis and reasoning methods. For each product (food item or ingredient) and each station (e.g. food producer, restaurant) scores are computed to estimate the likelihood that the product/station is related to a contamination event (e.g. causing an outbreak). The software also allows to run simulations based on cross contamination during production, processing or geographical parameters.

In this workshop we will demonstrate specific applications of the software and provide hands-on training for interested users. Therefore it is necessary to bring own laptops. The laptop must be able to connect to Wi-Fi via WPA2.

The target audience of this workshop is employees of risk management and assessment authorities from the European member states with IT-application experience. Ideally, the participant will be a contact point in future international tracing investigations and for their respective countries.