What is the difference between Food Safety and Food Quality?
Food needs to be safe before it can be considered to be a quality food. It can be safe but not a quality food. Safety is an integral component of food quality. Food safety involves ensuring a food that does not make most people ill. Usually ensuring a food is safe involves protecting a food from chemical, biological and physical contamination, or ensuring that any product harmful to the consumer such as a naturally occurring toxin that is normally destroyed during heating is actually destroyed. Pasteurised milk is not sterile; it can still contain viable micro-organisms at levels that would be harmless to most people. Food quality involves making sure the food is safe as well as making sure the product is attractive to the purchaser. A product may have an off flavour, unattractive mouthfeel or colour but be perfectly safe. A quality product, while needing to be safe, must meet other, often subjective, requirements.
Food needs to be safe before it can be considered to be a quality food. It can be safe but not a quality food. Safety is an integral component of food quality. Food safety involves ensuring a food that does not make most people ill. Usually ensuring a food is safe involves protecting a food from chemical, biological and physical contamination, or ensuring that any product harmful to the consumer such as a naturally occurring toxin that is normally destroyed during heating is actually destroyed. Pasteurised milk is not sterile; it can still contain viable micro-organisms at levels that would be harmless to most people. Food quality involves making sure the food is safe as well as making sure the product is attractive to the purchaser. A product may have an off flavour, unattractive mouthfeel or colour but be perfectly safe. A quality product, while needing to be safe, must meet other, often subjective, requirements. For example, pasteurised milk, while being safe, may have been cooked a
Food safety involves the knowledge, processes, sanitary design, etc. needed to ensure that food remains safe at all stages of production. This includes sourcing ingredients and packaging from trusted sources, training team members in safe food handling, documentation of temperatures, recipes, dates, etc., tracking of lot codes, pest control, etc.
While there is overlap between food safety and food quality, the latter refers more to consistently producing products that meet expected parameters such as freshness, desired flavor, consistent performance, consistent size, etc. Something is good quality if it turned out exactly as you planned that it should.
