Case Study: Shanghai Food and Drug Administration achieves robust food-safety protection with Palisade’s @RISK

RISK Helps Shanghai Food and Drug Administration Guarantee Public Food Safety

The Shanghai FDA (Shanghai Food and Drug Administration) is the municipal agency charged with monitoring the safety of food, drugs, supplements and cosmetics for more than 20 million residents. Confronted with large, complex datasets and an inability to perform probabilistic exposure simulations—relying instead on mean averages that missed highly exposed or sensitive subgroups—the agency needed robust risk-evaluation software. Since 2007 the Shanghai FDA has used Palisade’s @RISK to support contaminant monitoring and food-safety risk assessment.

Using Palisade’s @RISK (and later the DecisionTools Suite), the Shanghai FDA applied Monte Carlo simulation, distribution fitting and 10,000-run simulations to quantify exposure to nitrite, cadmium, vomitoxin, Bacillus cereus, Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Listeria. Analysis of 370 cooked meat samples found 16 exceeding nitrite standards (~4%), and simulations showed possibilities of exceeding acute nitrite thresholds and ADI, leading to concrete management measures (for example, recommending bans on nitrite use in food service). Palisade’s tools produced measurable, quantitative exposure assessments, replaced subjective methods, and enabled targeted interventions that strengthened food-safety oversight for Shanghai’s population.

Shanghai FDA