Risk Based Auditing in the Food Chain

Today’s food sector is a conglomerate of international, long, fast changing and highly connected and depending networks which follows new consumer trends, chemical-, physical- microbiological- and technical innovations and demographic, cultural, legal and economic developments. Food chains have changed dramatically due to technical and demographic changes over the last decades. Although huge efforts are made to ensure high quality and integrity, food-borne outbreaks and food scandals still happen to an undesired extent. Questions on how we can react appropriately to the rising complexity of the food chain, what risk-based approaches are and how they can help to cope with todays’ challenges arise.

Objective
The objective of this PhD project is the proof of concept of a systems-science based framework for risk based auditing in the food chain by using multi methods of data analysis and serious gaming for data enrichment. Using key risk indicators and factors in their techno-managerial context, evidence based decision making shall be enabled.

Practical Deliverable
A prototype of a science based tool shall enable practitioners in the future to efficiently gather, analyse and validate data to assess dynamic risks in their specific context. Furthermore, key risk performance indicators for the practice shall be generated.

Approach
Serious Gaming is the simulation of reality on a specified abstract level with stakeholders of the food chain in question and will be used as a “rapid method” in this project. The present-state-gaming of this approach will be used to analyse complex risk systems to get expert input of the cause and effect relationships between important risk variables and their dynamics.