Background

A significant part of foodborne infections is caused by food eaten at home, and food safety messages are given to help consumers mitigate risk. The World Health Organisation (WHO) “Five Keys to Safer Food”, developed about 20 years ago has been used with success worldwide to provide general advice on how to prepare food safely.

Scope and Approach

In this commentary, we discuss how food safety messages could be updated using a holistic approach built on implementation science, considering new food consumption patterns and insights from natural and social sciences. A stepwise approach for developing and evaluating food safety messages, performed in the European project SafeConsume, is presented. The top pathogen-food combinations associated with foodborne disease in Europe combined with common consumer practices were used to identify behaviours potentially leading to illness. Food safety messages were suggested and evaluated for understanding as well as capability, opportunity and motivation in an expert survey.

Key Findings and Conclusions

Overall, the food safety topics prioritised overlapped with those from WHO. The opportunity and motivation for changing behaviour, (e.g. choose pasteurised egg) were identified as important restrictions for uptake of messages. Also, the large variation in basic terminology, such as “thoroughly cooked” is a challenge. Therefore, to enhance the capability, there is a need to be very specific, without excluding other safe alternatives or making lengthy explanations. The food safety messages suggested by the expert group were evaluated as more likely to the implemented among domestic cooks and resulting in safer practices than corresponding WHO messages.

In the H2020 RIA Safeconsume, a web-based expert survey was performed to measure potential impact of a set of Food Safety Messages on consumers' food practices. For each message, the experts gave a score on potential capability, motivation and opportunity for consumers to change behaviour. The dataset is the raw data collected, that is the scores given for each participant and each Food Safety Message. Also, data on the field of expertise and country of residence were collected. 

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