On World Food Safety Day, APIYCNA celebrates the fundamental role of science in ensuring safe and nutritious foods for infants and young children across Asia Pacific

As the leading association representing the infant and young child nutrition industry in the Asia Pacific region, APIYCNA is proud to provide people with the essential safe and nutritious foods they need to live, grow and thrive. This would not be possible without science. Scientifically formulated foods for special dietary uses (FSDU) support people throughout all stages of life, from the healthy growth and development of infants and young children to the dietary management of the elderly and people with certain diseases.

Industry science underpins food processing, research and innovation, and risk assessments. It also supports regulations and standards, and labelling and claims.

–Food Processing: Processing is fundamental to nutrition and food safety in infant and young child nutrition products, ensuring the stability and uniform distribution of nutrients, improving digestibility and bioavailability, enabling fortification with sensitive ingredients, removing contaminants and ensuring microbiological safety. It also provides solutions, including through the addition of additives, to technical challenges, such as prolonging shelf-life, preventing the separation of ingredients, masking unpalatable tastes, maintaining the physical stability and making foods easier to swallow.
–Research and Innovation: Extensive research and expertise is invested in the advancement of nutrition science, continuous product improvement and innovation. This helps ensure that infant and young child nutrition products in Asia Pacific are optimised in terms of safety and nutritional adequacy.
–Risk Assessments: Risks related to potential hazards in FSDU, such as contaminants, allergens and toxins, are identified and mitigated. Industry also contributes safety and exposure data to scientific bodies, such as JECFA, that ensure food standards are science-based. This is critical as infants and young children are more vulnerable than the general population.
–Regulations and Standards: Our industry contributes scientific and factual information to regulatory processes, sharing information on the latest advances in nutrition science and providing insights into product research and innovation. Furthermore, scientific methods of analysis support food safety and quality by ensuring nutritional value, enabling quality control, detecting harmful substances, ensuring regulatory compliance and supporting innovation.
–Labels and Claims: Science-based labels and claims on infant and young child nutrition products are instruments to ensure food safety, compliance and transparency as they must clearly communicate the product’s intended use, nutritional content and any health claims to avoid misuse and ensure suitability for vulnerable populations. This is crucial as inaccurate or insufficient labels could have significant health implications for infant and young children.

Food safety is everyone’s business – As an industry, we are committed to enforcing the strictest standards and our members take pride in producing foods based on the latest scientific information, accredited food production and manufacturing operations and other global food management systems.

Since its founding, APIYCNA has supported the work of Codex Alimentarius in establishing science-based food standards, guidelines and codes of practice that ensure food safety and quality. Our expertise in processes, ingredients, systems and data enable us to provide robust scientific information to support risk analysis and decisions taken by Codex and other global, regional and national authoritative bodies. We are committed to working with regulators, policy-makers and other stakeholders to improve the health and well-being of current and future generations.

We support World Food Safety Day as an opportunity to celebrate the dedication of all stakeholders who safeguard the safety and nutritional quality of infant and young child nutrition products. Together, we reaffirm our commitment to improving the health and wellbeing of infants and young children — today and for generations to come.