Dubai Leadership: The Digitization of Food Safety Management

By John G. Keogh

“Food safety management will go completely digital by the end of 2020” according to Jehaina Al Ali from the Dubai Municipality. I met up with Jehaina and her colleague Bobby Krishna recently at the Dubai Food Safety Conference to discuss their plans.

The Foodwatch platform was created to enable the modernization and digitization of all aspects of the municipality’s food safety management. The platform facilitates data exchange between all stakeholders in the public and private sectors. It stores, manages and distributes food safety information and validated nutrition information. But Foodwatch doesn’t stop there according to Jehaina and Bobby. The platform will include modern technologies such as blockchain, smart contracts, artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics and full end-to-end traceability and recall management. They were keen to point out that the platform will cater to consumers wanting to find nutritional information, quality ratings for restaurants or menus with special dietary preferences such as vegan, halal or allergen data.