Digitalization and official food safety inspections at retail establishments

Authors gratefully acknowledge and thank funding from the Barcelona Public Health Agency (Agència de Salut Pública de Barcelona, Spain) under Grant BEQU-2020-01. This multi-country survey study is the first research to our knowledge exploring the use of a digital environment during inspections in countries of the EU. This study underlines that many CAs in the EU countries already use a digital environment to support inspections at retail establishments. Moreover, the majority of CAs had similar reasons for and results derived from using this environment related to consistency of official control. In the same line, almost all CAs that use a digital environment carry out the same processes during inspections through such an environment. The results of this research provide interesting insights about the utility of digital technologies in official control, showing their possibilities and benefits. Moreover, these results might help policy-and decision-makers of CAs that do not use a digital environment during inspection to implement such an environment and improve the current official food control system.Based on our results, most of the CAs automate processes related to the management of official control. Those processes include the risk classification of food establishments, the selection of establishments to inspect according to their classification and the generation of notifications of follow-up inspections. Differences in applying the internal criteria of CAs for those processes would generate inconsistencies for example of how inspections for certain establishments are prioritized over the rest of establishments or frequencies of follow-up inspections. For instance, electronic work planning and scheduling tools are employed to support healthcare workers to actively remind upcoming events and prioritize visits (Labrique et al., 2013). By automatizing those processes, the responsibility to ensure that official control is performed consistently according to the internal guidelines relies on the criteria pre-established at the digital environment to automate the processes and not on officers' criteria. Likewise, this context may potentially help to prioritize risk-based planning of inspection visits and resource allocation. In view to automate processes according to a harmonized criterion, preliminary work has been developed in the EU to implement digital tools to support officers to automatically classify food when sampling according to the FoodEx2 classi