Innovation is a driver in accelerating the transition to sustainable, healthy and inclusive food systems, from primary production to consumption. While it can contribute to developing solutions and overcoming barriers, it can also introduce potential emerging issues or risks related to new food or feed materials or new processing technologies.
EFSA launched in 2021 a project to ensure preparedness for the assessment of safety of new food/feed sources and production technologies with the collaboration of the Joint Research Centre (JRC). The aim of this project was to evaluate whether signals of emerging technologies (‘weak signals’) in the field of new food/feed sources and innovative production technologies can be identified, combining the expertise and IT systems of JRC (TIM project) to detect weak signals with EFSA’s expert knowledge to validate these signals. JRC’s TIM Technology is a software dedicated to data analytics on innovation‐related data, which includes text‐mining features for documents and keywords analysis allowing for the detection of active topics and issues in sets of documents. A structured future‐thinking approach on weak signals in the area of new food/feed sources and production technologies can provide a better understanding of various challenges and potential emerging issues or risks in an extremely quickly evolving global context.