IBM Research and international food giant Mars Inc. in January established the Consortium for Sequencing the Food Supply Chain. In a statement, they call it “a collaborative food safety platform that will leverage advances in genomics to further our understanding of what makes food safe.”
The consortium said it will conduct the largest-ever metagenomics study to categorize and understand micro-organisms and the factors that influence their activity in a normal, safe factory environment. This work could be extended into the larger context of the food supply chain from farm to fork and lead to new insights into how micro-organisms interact within a factory ecology and be better controlled by new data and science-driven practices.