Selection and improving of fit-for-purpose sampling procedures for specific foods and risks.

Food safety represents a wide and significant concept within public health, which has been defined by the Codex Alimentarius as “Assurance that food will not cause harm to the consumer when prepared and/or eaten according to its intended use” (CAC, 1997). However that definition can be considered surpassed, as food safety has become a scientific discipline covering different areas along the food chain, from prevention and surveillance to detection and control, to prevent foodborne illness. As a result, a wide and innovative combination of disciplines and research areas, which were previously totally fragmented, are being deployed through the concept of food safety to achieve an integrated crosscutting approach with a total food chain vision. As a result, different research initiatives have been launched for addressing different aspects of the broad research area of food safety. In this context, the European Union granted the multiyear collaborative project BASELINE (www. baselineeurope.eu) to analyze and develop sampling strategies to support the European policies in food safety with the final goal of improved quantitative risk analysis. This special issue presents the main results of the BASELINE project, particularly those related to the impact of novel concepts such as Performance Objectives (POs) and Food Safety (FSOs) in sampling plans and food safety, as well as to the validation and harmonization of alternative molecular methods for detection of main foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella spp. and Listeria monocytogenes. The original idea of the BASELINE project was to extensively explore the possibility, and also opportunity, to include PO/FSO in future European Regulations taking into account that a possible reason for the FSO and PO metrics not being used could be that there is a little guidance on how to establish and apply them. To fill this gap, the results the BASELINE project has obtained are presented in this special issue to illustrate the application of these new concepts in different food supply chains. On top of that, one of the main BASELINE objectives was also to study the need of new alternative methods for improving the current or adapted sampling plans, and to define a roadmap from their definition to their final international validation. In that scenario, BASELINE has become an excellent example on how to develop novel diagnostic strategies in food safety which can be easily implemented; the main results obtained in this project are shown in this special issue. The first contribution of this special issue is a general overview on the challenge of defining risk based metrics to improve food safety. Afterwards, the subsequent papers aim at defining sampling plans to verify the food lots' compliance to such metrics for specific combination of biological hazards and food defined in BASELINE. In particular, the PO formulation for Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes in three main food chains: pork meat products (fresh meat intended to be eaten cooked), seafood (salmon intended to be used as sushi and sashimi)