Daniela Spandri
Tecnologo Alimentare, Ordine del Piemonte e Valle d’Aosta, Italy
Title: The food technologist: The professional of quality and food safety
Biography
Biography: Daniela Spandri
Abstract
The food technologist is the expert in the quality, safety and sustainability of the agri-food system. The task of the food technologist is to watch over food processes and everything related to them to ensure consumer safety. It is enough to reflect on our personal experience to understand the importance of quality in everyday life. How often does a particular product or service do not meet our needs, or simply our expectations? Quality is defined by the UNI EN ISO 8402 standard as the set properties and characteristics of a product or service that give the ability to satisfy needs expressed or implicit. From this definition we understand how quality has many facets. For the consumer, it is a subjective factor, which is determined by subjective and objective factors and dependent on the moment and/or the situation. For companies and large-scale distribution it is instead an objective factor, that is, well defined, measurable and verifiable with respect to certain standard parameters concerning technology, food safety and environmental sustainability. Therefore, according to these definitions, that of food safety is essential to the concept of quality. Food safety was defined by the FAO in 1996 as the possibility of ensuring sufficient, safe and nutritious food for all people at all times to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Food safety is therefore objective, defined by current legislation and perceived by everyone in the same way. Therefore, in the concept of total quality of food, several interrelated factors contribute, including food safety, as well as the health, chemical, nutritional, legal, organoleptic quality of origin and, in recent years, also factors linked to environmental sustainability. Quality is therefore a wide and constantly evolving subject: the goal of companies is to reach it and keep it throughout time; and the goal of the food technologist to contribute to satisfy the quality.