Advancing food safety behavior with AI: Innovations and opportunities in the food manufacturing sector

The importance of human behavior in ensuring regulatory compliance and food safety is becoming increasing well recognized by academics, regulators and people working across all aspects of the food industry. This article explores the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in advancing food safety behaviors due to its developing capabilities to enhance critical food safety features, namely: monitoring, evaluation, and action. AI-assisted monitoring systems (Section 2.1) could enable accurate and unobtrusive observation of food safety behaviors such as hand hygiene and personal protective equipment compliance. AI-assisted evaluation tools (Section 2.2) could leverage advanced data analytics and large language models to evaluate food safety culture indicators comprehensively, enabling actionable insights and proactive decision-making. Additionally, AI interventions (Section 2.3), such as real-time feedback, personalized training, and communication assistance, will facilitate behavioral improvements and effective communication. Together, these phases have the potential to create a continuous AI-assisted cycle of improvement, in which behavior is assessed, a company's food safety culture is measured, actions based on objective evaluations are undertaken, and their effectiveness is measured. Such an adaptive approach will ensure a dynamic and responsive system capable of driving enhancements in food safety behaviors. While anticipating the transformative power of AI technologies, food manufacturers must also prepare themselves to address potential challenges related to technical limitations, ethical concerns, and a reluctance to adopt. This article highlights innovative AI applications, identifies opportunities for cross-sectoral adoption, proposes challenges and future directions to improve food safety behaviors. • AI-assisted cycle to monitor, evaluate, improve, and sustain food safety behavior. • AI monitoring tracks behaviors and emotions for objective evaluation and feedback. • AI analyzes food safety data, predicts risks, and fosters proactive food safety actions. • AI offers personalized and effective food safety training and communication solutions. • AI faces biases, privacy concerns, and resistance, so future studies are recommended.