Food quality is an essential aspect of the food industry. Time-temperature indicator (TTI) technology has the capability to provide information on temperature fluctuations that temperature-sensitive food products have undergone. However, the adoption of the TTI technology in the consumer market has yet to materialize despite the many benefits that TTIs bring to food manufacturers, retailers and consumers. One of the reasons for this could be the general lack of knowledge regarding consumers' perceptions of TTIs. The aim of this study is to understand the consumers' knowledge, interest and perceptions of TTIs. To reach this aim, 16 focus group discussions and a quantitative survey were conducted in four European countries (Finland, Greece, France and Germany) during May-October 2012. Consumers' views on both the TTI technology concept and two commercially available TTI applications were studied. The results of the study show that consumers in all countries appreciate and understand TTI technology and associate differing benefits with it, especially so in warmer countries. On the other hand, the studied applications did not meet all consumers' expectations implying the need for further work to enable TTIs to gain a wider acceptance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. INTRODUCTIONFood law and the recent regulatory changes in the food industry in Europe emphasize the importance of a structured quality assurance system using the hazard analysis critical control point method and good manufacturing and hygiene practices. Such a system is based on prevention and control throughout the manufacturing process rather than on testing and verification of final products. Its application requires a continuous monitoring and control of critical parameters throughout the manufacturing process not only at the production level but also at the entire food chain from production through distribution and storage including domestic storage at the consumer level. the most impacting factors to prevent the spoilage of temperature-sensitive products such as meat, fish and poultry. From the retailers' perspective, spoiled products reaching consumers' fridges might lead to loss of reputation, harm to the brand and extensive costs and efforts to fix the damage. From the manufacturers' viewpoint, and especially from the viewpoint of small and medium-size companies, the outcomes might be even more serious because of the low amount of resources to deal with such a situation.To prevent spoiled products falling into the hands of consumers, different technologies have been developed. For instance, an electronic nose has been introduced for quality control assessment in modified atmosphere packaged (MAP) products.2 Another technology holding potential for ensuring the quality of temperature-sensitive food products, such as meat, fish or chilled ready-to-eat foods, is intelligent label technology.3 This technology enables monitoring the integrity of the cold chain through the entire value chain from the manufacturer's facilities to consumers' fr...

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In food safety and public health risk evaluations, microbiological exposure assessment plays a central role as it provides an estimation of both the likelihood and the level of the microbial hazard in a specified consumer portion of food and takes microbial behaviour into account. While until now mostly phenotypic data have been used in exposure assessment, mechanistic cellular information, obtained using omics techniques, will enable the fine tuning of exposure assessments to move towards the next generation of microbiological risk assessment. In particular, metagenomics can help in characterizing the food and factory environment microbiota (endogenous microbiota and potentially pathogens) and the changes over time under the environmental conditions associated with processing, preservation and storage. The difficulty lies in moving up to a quantitative exposure assessment, because the development of models that enable the prediction of dynamics of pathogens in a complex food ecosystem is still in its infancy in the food safety domain. In addition, collecting and storing the environmental data (metadata) required to inform the models has not yet been organised at a large scale. In contrast, progress in biomarker identification and characterization has already opened the possibility of making qualitative or even quantitative connection between process and formulation conditions and microbial responses at the strain level. In term of modelling approaches, without changing radically the usual model structure, changes in model inputs are expected: instead of (or as well as) building models upon phenotypic characteristics such as for example minimal temperature where growth is expected, exposure assessment models could use biomarker response intensity as inputs. These new generations of strain-level models will bring an added value in predicting the variability in pathogen behaviour. Altogether, these insights based upon omics techniques will increase our (quantitative) knowledge on pathogenic strains and consequently will reduce our uncertainty; the exposure assessment of a specific combination of pathogen and food will be then more accurate. This progress will benefit the whole community of safety assessors and research scientists from academia, regulatory agencies and industry.

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Abstract" huge amount of hazardous organopollutants, often persistent and toxic, is produced annually over the world and may contaminate soil, water, ground water, and air.

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