Dry or low-moisture foods (LMFs), whether a pet’s kibble or a child’s snack, may feel safe, but they still pose serious microbial risks. Dry doesn’t necessarily mean safe. As outlined in the recent Op-Ed “Shared Science for Shared Safety: Strategies for Pet and Human Food Safety”, pathogens like Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes can persist in LMF environments for months even though the water activity is too low for growth.
The Op-Ed highlights how the manufacturing, monitoring, sanitation and kill-step verification practices in human food production have strong parallels and actionable transferability to pet food production. Dry sanitation, zone-based environmental monitoring, and robust thermal validation are strategies shared across both sectors.
At the recent Food Safety Consortium Conference held in October in Northern Virginia, in the session titled “Dry Doesn’t Mean Safe: Pathogens in Low Moisture Foods” IAFNS underscored how cross-sector collaboration among human-food and pet-food industries can elevate overall food safety resilience. By acknowledging the science-based intersection between pet and human foods, manufacturers, regulators and researchers can adopt unified frameworks, thereby protecting both human and animal consumers.
Investing in shared surveillance, data-exchange, and prevention systems bridges traditional siloes. Food safety mean food safety for every member of the household, human or pet.