From a niche market, the organic sector has become a global market with long supply chains and intercontinental trade, rewarding players with a significant price premium. As a consequence, it is facing vulnerabilities to fraudulent activities, as shown by the police operation Opson VIII, affecting authenticity of these food products and impacting adversely consumer trust. Indeed, the recent "Barometer of organic product in France -2023" of the Agence Bio, pointed out that consumers have more doubts on the organic product' integrity, it is now the second hindrance to buy organic products, just after the price. Up to now, no analytical method could determine in routine conditions whether a product was organic or not. Non-targeted analyses have a promising potential for overcoming this challenge. A large-scale initiative called True Organic Food (TOFoo), led by Eurofins, supported by 10 partners and with financial support from the French funding agency Bpifrance, has been launched mid-2020 to develop and validate such methods. The challenge was to design such non-targeted multi-technical methods and to demonstrate high sensitivity and specificity on a large number of representative samples, to ensure that all the diversity which can be found in organic food products could be encompassed. A combination of high resolution techniques was tested, including liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and isotopic ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS). Thousands of authentic food products were collected along with metadata on agricultural practices. The first results were applied to UHT milk and tomatoes. The AI (neural networks) and statistical models classify correctly more than 90% of the samples according to the production system. Future developments will deal with other food products, such as grains and apples. Along with traceability tools, these new tools will better guarantee that only authorised practices have been used along the supply chain, thus increasing trust in the organic production system. In the move from a bestefforts obligation towards a performance requirement, they will become valuable tools for demonstrating, with science based-evidence, that organic specifications are met.

PARC is a partnership set up under Horizon Europe to strengthen research and innovation in the assessment of risks, hazards and exposure to chemical substances. Bringing together communities working in the fields of public health, occupational health, food safety and environmental protection, PARC aims to develop research and innovation on new methodological approaches that can be used to assess the risk of chemical substances in today's and tomorrow's regulatory context, with a view to the Sustainable Chemistry Strategy. PARC is also contributing to the implementation of human biomonitoring, and to collaboration between monitoring systems to facilitate the pooling of knowledge, methods and data with a view to an early warning system.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) provides scientific advice to the European Commission, the European Parliament and the EU Member States on risks associated with the food chain. Guided by this mission, EFSA already acquired robust knowledge and expertise in the field of dietary exposure to single chemicals or (restricted, pre-defined) groups of chemicals. There is a growing scientific consensus, however, that the effect of simultaneous exposure to multiple chemicals (also referred to as unintentional mixtures) must be considered, and the EU Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability (CSS) has set the goal of improving public health protection from risks caused by such unintentional mixtures. EFSA therefore committed, as part of its Strategy 2027, to develop the risk assessment of combined exposure to multiple chemicals across regulatory domains.Considerable progress has been made in the field of pesticides, where dietary cumulative risk assessment has been recently implemented for pesticides affecting the nervous system, thyroid and cranio-facial alterations. Cumulative risk assessments for pesticides affecting liver and kidneys are ongoing. Furthermore, EFSA supports the development of open-source tools that will facilitate the execution of such assessments by national competent authorities and a roadmap for action on the Risk Assessment of Combined Exposure to Multiple Chemicals (RACEMiC) has recently been issued, laying down the corner stones for possible implementation in other regulatory frameworks. This oral presentation will provide an overview of the ongoing initiatives in this area and provide insight on how EFSA will leverage the experience gained in the field of pesticides to implement this type of assessments in other domains and build the assessment capacity with Member States

Long-term management of human health requires a comprehensive understanding of the environmental influences that affect it. To achieve this, there is a need for comprehensive, high-quality data on exposure in order to study the causes of certain diseases in humans and thus manage situations more effectively. Food is one of the major routes by which humans are exposed to chemical substances; whether they are of natural or synthetic origin, intentionally produced or not, they are hazards that can enter the food chain at different levels and, depending on their toxicity and levels of exposure, pose a risk to consumers.
While some substances have been well known for decades (e.g. mycotoxins, heavy metals or dioxins), others have been identified more recently as presenting a food-related risk, such as perfluorinated compounds or chloroparaffins. It is therefore accepted that a considerable number of additional substances likely to present a risk to human health are present in the food chain, even though they have not yet been described. The total number of substances of concern of human or natural origin already assessed, regulated or monitored is small compared to the 105 industrial chemicals described as being in use.
In addition, several hundred new chemical substances are produced each year due to rapid innovation in the chemical industry or new processing trends. This facet of the human chemical exposome has stimulated methodological research capable of revealing these substances. Several strategies are being deployed by laboratories to solve the particular problem of detecting emerging contaminants in the food chain. The first focuses on substances that are already known or have recently been described, and aims to develop effective analytical approaches for objectively identifying the presence of these contaminants in foodstuffs and measuring their concentration levels in order to help characterise consumer exposure.
The second of these approaches explores emerging issues in a more global way, using research strategies based on particular chemical motifs (e.g. halogen-driven data processing), specific effects (e.g. involving metabolomics) or the modelling of probable structures. The innovative analytical strategies implemented as part of these two approaches will be detailed in order to illustrate the identification of emerging hazards in the food chain with the aim of broadening knowledge of consumer chemical exposure.

The EU legislation on contaminants Council Regulation (EEC) No 315/93 of 8 February 1993 provides that food containing a contaminant in an amount which is unacceptable from the public health viewpoint shall not be placed on the market (food can only be placed on the market when it is safe). Furthermore, it is foreseen that contaminant levels shall be kept as low as can reasonably be achieved by following good practices at all stages of the production chain and in order to protect public health, maximum levels for specific contaminants shall be established where necessary.
In recent years, regulatory levels for several contmainants have been established and updated and this to take account of the outcome of risk assessments performed by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The maximum levels are established in Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/915 of 25 April 2023 on maximum levels for certain contaminants in food and repealing Regulation (EC) No 1881/2006. Despite these frequent updates to the EU contamaints legislaiton, there is still a lot of work ahead!
In the presentation, recent and future developments on EU legislation on contaminants in food shall be presented. Climate change, changes in dietary patterns, novel/new foods, Green deal policies (Farm to Fork strategy, Biodiversity strategy), circular economy etc entail new challenges for the safety of the food chain. In addition, in order to continue to ensure a high level of food safety it is necessary not to address single contaminants individually but also address more attention to the combined exposure to multiple contaminants. In addition, particular attention shall be paid to the analytical requirements and analytical challenges for an effective EU policy on contaminants in food. Indeed, for an effective risk management and enforcement, it is not only sufficient that a method of analysis is available, but the method of analysis must be able to be used for routine control, be reliable, sensitive, quick and preferably cheap.