FoodEx2 maintenance 2023

Abstract

FoodEx2 is a comprehensive food classification and description system developed and maintained by EFSA to provide a standardized terminology backbone for representing and interpreting samples across the entire food safety risk assessment lifecycle, from data collection across different food and feed safety domains (e.g., monitoring of pesticides residues or biological hazards) to exposure assessment. To keep this terminology and sample coding framework fit-for-purpose, meeting evolving scientific and legislative requirements, a regular maintenance of this system is of utmost importance. Six major updates were carried out so far, with all performed changes documented in annual maintenance reports. This technical report describes the outcome of the seventh maintenance process done in 2023, which contained addition of new terms, inclusion of a new facet hierarchy, creation of two novel implicit attributes, reportability changes of some terms, deprecation of terms and amendments to existing terms including enrichment of implicit facets and changes of the hierarchical tree structure and parent-child relationships.