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This Sunday is World Food Safety Day.
The theme for 2026: “From burden to solutions, safe food everywhere.”
At Aromatech US, our team in Orlando marked the occasion with something out of the ordinary. Our Quality Assurance & Regulatory Affairs Specialist, Rebecca, led a hands-on session that brought food safety and food security to life, through science, data, and a live demonstration that made everyone think twice about the surfaces they touch every day.
She started with a simple question to the room: what three words come to mind when you think about food safety?
The answers: health, clean, quality, regulations, trust… mapped almost exactly to the principles we operate by every day.
Then, came the petri dishes.
Our Quality team swabbed five everyday office surfaces, gloves, a cell phone, a door knob, a table, and even the open air, incubated the samples for 72 hours, and presented the results to the team. What looked clean to the naked eye told a very different story.
Even though this was only a demonstration kit, not intended to identify any pathogens, it provided an opportunity to visualize the microbiological presence in our lives, even when we cannot see it. It was definitely one of those moments where the science stops being abstract.
From there, the session moved into a distinction that doesn’t get enough attention: food safety and food security are not the same thing.
Food safety is quality and hazard-free handling of food. Food security is whether people can access it in the first place, shaped by four pillars: availability, access, utilization, and stability. When one breaks down, it puts pressure on the others. And the numbers show help understand that pressure:
– Nearly 1 in 9 people worldwide fall ill from contaminated food each year
– Children under 5 bear 29% of the global health burden from unsafe food
– 47.9 million people in the US lived in food-insecure households in 2024
At a flavor house, food safety is built into everything we do.
Our HACCP programs, GMP compliance, supplier controls, traceability systems. But this session reminded us that our work doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The flavors we produce end up in products that reach real people. That responsibility doesn’t end at our facility door.
Thank you, Rebecca, for building and leading this session, and for making it genuinely engaging for the everyone involved.
