The complexity of the current food safety supply world wide, has led Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) to establishing Risk Analysis as the single framework for building food safety control programs. Through the activities of Codex Alimentarius and expert consultations, FAO and WHO have developed a series of guidelines and reports that detail out the various steps in Risk Analysis, namely Risk Management, Risk Assessment and Risk Communication. The Risk Analysis approach enables integration between operational food management systems, such as Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP), public health and governmental decisions. The scientific progress in the area of epidemiology, pathogens surveillance, detection and typing methods, sampling and definitely of predictive microbiology and risk assessment have offered an important assistance to Food Safety Management.The identification of potential hazards in a food chain is the primary step of risk assessment. Given the complexity of the modern food supply chains, there is intensive need for tools performing risk profiling and risk ranking of potential food safety problems. Identification and ranking of hazards in a food chain may be based on available literature on severity of pathogens, on surveillance and epidemiological data, on consumption patterns (serving size and frequency of consumption) and on expert opinions.Risk profiling may determine the necessity of a detailed quantitative risk assessment, or serve as a quick food management option.The quantitative risk may be assessed by the use of reliable software tools which include the interpretation of predictive models under critical conditions. Predictive models are classified into three categories: (i) the primary models, which are used to describe the changes of the microbial population density as a function of time using a limited number of kinetic parameters (e.g. lag time, rates of growth or inactivation, maximum population reached), that together describe the change in the population size; (ii) the secondary models, which describe the effect of environmental parameters (temperature, NaCl, pH, etc.) on kinetic parameters, estimated by the primary models; and (iii) the tertiary models, which constitute computer tools integrating the primary and secondary models into user-friendly software. Growth models are fundamental tools in predictive microbiology, especially for Ready-to-Eat foods, since they allow the assessment of pathogens levels to which the consumers are being exposed during consumption.

In order to generate predictions of microbial responses in foods, in response to key environmental and physicochemical factors and/or food additives, we developed  software tools and microbial databases to allow users to obtain information and assess the food microbial risk in a rapid and convenient way.