Tools and data requirements for assessing substances in foods: Development of the MCRA risk assessment tool and a consumer app

Food may contain hazardous substances such as contaminants or residues from pesticides or food packaging materials. Food risk assessment requires many data (e.g. chemical concentrations, food consumption and health hazards). There are already well-established datasets (e.g. in EFSA collections), but also emerging datasets which can be very useful (e.g. data from total diet studies). Tools for food risk assessment are available, but require well-formatted input data. Data harmonisation and data conversion are therefore essential steps. Food risk assessment is complex and is constantly evolving, using more complex statistical approaches as the discipline develops. Therefore it is useful to develop demonstrator software to facilitate understanding and guide different identified user groups including risk assessors and consumers. Task 4.3 of the FNS-Cloud project aims to create e-services that enable two examples of user communities, consumers and researchers/risk assessors, to evaluate and visualise chemical food safety data. Consumers will be able to use concentration data from total diet studies (TDS) within decision making processes in their daily life, e.g. in the supermarket when purchasing foods. High-end users, e.g. risk assessors and researchers, will be able to use TDS or monitoring data for higher-tier more complex risk assessments. Specifically, the latter approach will use the probabilistic assessment with the Monte Carlo Risk Assessment (MCRA) tool. Within FNS-Cloud there are five phases in this process, split over WP 4 (Use cases) and WP 5 (Demonstrators), covering specification, implementation and testing (Task 4.3) and improvement and evaluation (in WP 5). In this report four use cases are outlined, using the MCRA tool (three use cases) or a new consumer app (one use case). The emphasis is on the formulation of user requirements, i.e. describing how the systems requirements should work for specific scenarios, on the required functionality of the tools, and on data organisation connecting different data sources such that they can be used together in the assessments. For some use cases preliminary results from running the exposure or risk assessments are reported. Final results of the use cases will be reported in a follow-up report (Deliverable 4.4).