Building a resilient pork supply chain to Salmonella spp

Abstract

Salmonella spp. control in pork supply chains has always been a challenging issue and insufficient control can lead to high social and economic consequences. Conventional risk management and risk management approaches and models are not sufficient to address potential food safety shocks caused by Salmonella spp., as they mainly focus on assessing measures to reduce Salmonella spp. risks instead of developing the resilience capability (e.g., flexibility to adapt to sudden changes in the risks). Our study is the first that incorporated the resilience concept to the quantitative modeling of Salmonella spp. spread in the pork supply chain. The objective of this study was to explore the resilience performance of the pork supply chain under different food safety shocks caused by Salmonella spp., and to investigate the effectiveness of interventions on reducing the impact of these shocks on the resilience performance of the chain. Scenario analysis indicated that the effectiveness of the investigated resilience strategies or interventions depended on the risk profile (i.e., default, minimum, maximum level of Salmonella spp. contamination) of the pork supply chain. For pork supply chains with minimum and default risk profiles, more attention should be paid to increasing resilience of pigs towards Salmonella spp. infection. For supply chains with maximum risk profile, the focus should be on improving the performance of the slaughterhouse, such as careful evisceration, logistic slaughtering. To conclude, enhancing resilience performance of the pork supply chain can contribute to a safe pork supply.