Mars Chief Science Officer: Cross-Sector Collaboration Will be Key to Advances in Food Safety

23 Sep 2015 --- Mars is opening a Global Food Safety Center (GFSC) tomorrow [September 24] near Beijing, China, to serve as a pre-competitive research and training hub. As a global food business that uses 7 million tons of raw materials annually, the company recognizes its responsibility in ensuring the safety of the global food supply chain. The first-of-its kind, state-of-the art facility is located just north of Beijing. The $15 million dollar center will house analytical chemistry and microbiology laboratories, interactive training laboratories and a conference auditorium.

“The purpose of this Center is that it is a Global Food Safety Center. We are opening it in China, but we could just as easily have opened it in another leading cosmopolitan area of relevance. But Beijing is certainly that and China is certainly a critical area of food supply – so it made as much sense there as anywhere else,” Harold Schmitz, Chief Science Officer at Mars told FoodIngredientsFirst in an exclusive interview. 

“Another interesting aspect is that this is the first center of this type built by industry focused entirely on food safety and the interests in advancing the research and also facilitating that research in food safety science into new products and services, that can improve public safety and then also the education component. So we have a unique combination of a company doing this at a large scale with respect to food safety and doing it with the pillars of research, teaching and education perspective.”

For Schmitz, the third key point is that around 95% of the activities that will happen in this Center will be precompetitive and is meant to be public domain perspective, from both a research and education perspective. Convening governments, academics, regulators – even competitors, Mars believes an industry focus on food safety will drive better access, availability, and nutrition as well as reduced food waste and an increase in overall quality of life. That requires a collaborative and open approach. “It is meant to really bring together people from around the world, but also from all the different sectors, such as government, industry, university foundations and other NGOS. So it is meant to really foster the creative cross-sector emphasis on a topic that needs to be emphasized, given food safety’s role on public safety and public health,” he says. 

This opening is the biggest milestone in Mars’ long history of smart partnerships that benefit the industry. Two examples in 2010, Mars, IBM and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) completed a two-year effort to sequence and annotate the cocoa genome. That was also pre-competitive. 

Second, possibly one of the biggest testaments in MARS’ commitments to date is the UC Davis-Mars Innovation Institute for Food and Health. This was designed with a pre-competitive lens in mind as well, ensuring universities, national laboratories, government research bodies, foundations, NGOs and again, competitors – can partner to solve in the food, agriculture and health issues around the world. MARS committed $40 million in the next decade and UC Davis also invested $20 million over the same time period in the hopes of rapidly accelerating innovation.

China has attracted many negative food safety headlines in recent years, particularly the melamine scandals, which haunted the pet food and most tragically the infant nutrition markets in the 2000s, but Schmitz is keen to stress that food safety challenges are a global concern that go far beyond China. 

“There have been some significant food safety challenges in China, but honestly if you take a step back and look at the data from around the world, there have been other headlines out of the US, western Europe and India with respect to some very significant food safety issues,” he notes

“You can look around the world and find these things. With that said, what China does represent is a very important market and an opportunity to represent food safety education at a very large scale, which is what we need to do. Within the Mars world, our Chinese associates were very welcoming for this and that was part of the reason for the excitement for opening there,” Schmitz adds.

The food safety center will focus on all of the Mars business units, rather than a single type of category. This covers human food, but the company is also of course a significant player in the pet food and pet health arena.

“A really key concept here is that given the level of scientific and technology advances in the world we live in today, it is a reasonable hypothesis that our food could be safer. We could deploy the cutting edge of food safety science and technology and integrating that with public health in the regulatory communities to have an even safer global food supply than we do, but we don’t yet, so we are really committing this effort to be in a place where the right kind of collaboration can happen, including uncommon collaboration.” 

“It is sometimes the usual players that collaborate over the decades and we need to invite more people into that mix. It is an area where everybody wins if you get it right and I think we can make some significant advances, not only at the regulatory and policy level, which is really important, but also at a genuinely inventing new ways at a technical level to make food safer,” he adds. 

For Schmitz, a specific technical area and where food safety could be improved is the area of microbiology and pathogens, where the key is the transformational concept that is happening is our understanding of the microbiome, which is the collective genetic understanding of all the microbial organisms that might be in a given environment. “Everybody thinks of the human gut in relation to probiotics, but it is really this ecology interaction at a microbial level that is the key player in whether a person will come down with salmonella or some other outcome from a pathogen,” he explains.

“At this moment it is my view that how we tend to look at food safety tends to be a reductionist way to reduce it to a single microbial pathogen. But we will create a single food supply chain, when we understand that that single pathogen operates in a very complex environment and we need to understand that,” he added. 

“That will require interacting with the biomedical community and the leading edge scientists in the genomic community in order to understand this for food safety and create a safer food supply. If we assume it will do at this new Center and beyond, what will happen will be new services and products that will offer new understanding of microbial pathogens that will make the food supply safer.”

There is also a role for processing optimization in advancing food safety. “When you look at the history of food in the modern of the last hundred years, it is the processing advances that have enabled to aid food security and other benefits. There have been a lot of great advances, but there is no reason why there is not more invention to be made there for better engineering and processing,” he noted. 

For Schmitz, a this deeper understanding of the microbiome is a great example of where you will see convergence between a world leading understanding of the microbial environment, converging with better understanding of advances in manufacturing and processing. “When those areas are integrated, we will be able to make even better processes that will give us more flexible, safer, nutritious and healthy food supply,” he notes. 

There is a also a role for traceability, with the Chinese melamine and the European horsemeat scandals serving as oft-repeated examples of what can go wrong if criminal adulteration is allowed to fester amid overly complex supply chains. Partnerships, such as the one in place with IBM, will be key to this. “At a certain level, traceability is a data science. It is also a chemical detection issue, in order to be able to monitor it. I immediately see this center helping from this regard, in that we are now going to have a collection of expertise and collaborative networks from around the world, who can really help to drive this concept.”

“It is one thing to send people to a region to perform a series of experiments. It is far more impactful if you can say that we have a physical infrastructure at the Center of a strong marketplace at scale. So we are going to have a network node in a place where we investigate traceability and make it better,” he concludes.

By Robin Wyers