This panel discussion from the 2025 American Food Sure Summit developed the conversation around the role of digital tools and AI in food safety processes.

The panellists were Adeniyi Odugbemi, Global Director – Food Safety and Defense, ADM, who built on his earlier presentation on the role of automation to prevent human errors, and Olawumi Yusuff, Senior Director, Food Safety at Ferrara.

The current context

The panellists acknowledged that there is a sliding scale for adoption of digital tools right now in the food safety industry, with some companies further ahead than others. However, they both stressed that it must not stay this way. For companies to remain competitive and efficient, it’s not about if but when, and it’s not about ‘in X years’, it’s about now.

But, why now?

The food industry is facing significant challenges – increased complexity in the supply chain, increased regulation, and more globalisation, to name but a few. And everything we need to help face these challenges, in the way of real-time and immediate data and being proactive, not reactive, comes from digital tools.

Challenges to implementation

1. Costs can be prohibitive – while executives see the value of food safety, it does not directly add to the bottom line. Therefore, the investment required in these digital tools can be hard to come by (as referenced in Dominic Mitial’s presentation about diplomacy).
2. IT restrictions and legacy systems – one thing is having the new digital tools, but do they speak to your existing IT systems? Often, older legacy systems are not equipped to integrate with these new tools, preventing data from transferring between the two. As a consequence, retrofitting is often required which is an additional cost.
3. Training and education of staff – if these systems aren’t user-friendly, they are as good as redundant, said Olawumi. It is important that you bring employees from different teams into the procurement process, to assess usability. Simple things like iPad functionality so the systems can be accessed on the go need to be checked.

Managing digital tools

Adeniyi shared the impact the EQMS system has had for his food safety teams at ADM: the real time pictures, lab results and notes from technicians provide unparalleled, virtually immediate visibility of a problem, allowing colleagues to problem solve much more quickly.

However, Olawumi reminded attendees that we cannot talk about leveraging digital platforms without talking about data cleaning and standardisation. The technology is only as good as the data being input, so if you’re not swabbing at the right place or the right time, digital tools won’t be able to help.

Before we implement any digital platform, the first work we always do is standardisation. We have to make sure we are comparing apples to apples across our facilities”, she said.

The role of AI

Both panellists agreed that AI is never going to completely take away human interaction or human intelligence – it is there to complement, not replace. AI learning tools can help us think in the right direction faster, but ChatGPT is not capable of writing a food safety plan. We know our factories and processes best and AI cannot replicate this knowledge.

Food safety culture

Food safety is a movement, a collaboration, not a department. And ‘culture’ means collectively working to a common goal. So adopting new technologies should be no different from this. Food safety leaders need to bring all departments and teams on board with any new platforms, empowering colleagues across the entire business to use the insights for decision-making.

To effectively integrate new systems into an existing food safety environment, setting clear parameters and ownership from the outset will help drive a strong food safety culture.