Team:BS United China/Human Practices
HP
Introduction
In order to develop a product being able to detect and restrain the food pathogenic P. aeruginosa, we have first consulted with the stackholder, such as the heads of major supermarkets, community members, and domain experts investigate the needs and importance of food decontamination. Through a visit to one of the major supermarkets in Shanghai, China, we have learned about the management process and hygienic protocols of fresh food common for main supermarkets. After distribution of an extensive online questionnaires, we have conducted follow-up interviews with five residents, which enable us to gain better understanding of public’s attitudes toward food safety and biological sterilization products. Their opinions, together with the advice from domain experts, were considered when we decided to design the antibacterial products to be sprayed on food surface.
Fig.1 HP work timeline
Yonghui supermarkets
Background
Supermarkets is an critical node linking fresh food and consumers. Supermarkets take on more social responsibilities and should have more systematic and strict procedures for purchasing, transporting, processing, and preserving fresh food.
Fig.2 Investigate the supermarket fresh food area
Aim
Yonghui Superstores is one of the top 500 enterprises, with its chain supermarkets covering 585 cities in China. We had an interview with the manager of one of the Yonghui supermarkets in Shanghai. We were surprised to find out some of the methods Yonghui employs to ensure food safety through their large-scale supply chain.
Q&A
Investigating the level of awareness supermarkets workers have for food quality was another major aim of our interview. According to manager’s prospective, awareness is something that can be strengthened with long periods of training, and employees who work at a supermarket do have higher awareness for the importance of food safety than ordinary people. However, he mentioned that simply smelling and looking to tell whether food is spoiled is still the norm. Therefore, he suggested that our product should replace the existing quality test that usually takes 3-4 days to complete. We are proud that with the use of our product, a more accurate and efficient test can be done in just over 10 minutes. This is a great reduction both in labor and costs for supermarkets.
Fig.3 Communicate with supervisor of Yonghui supermarket (Mr. Cai)
Consumers
Background
While quality supermarkets do take food off the shelves after 1-1.5 days, consumers often buy food and then use a simpler way of storing and handling food - putting it all in the refrigerator. In the absence of disinfection, food is at greater risk of contamination. Consumers’ perceptions of food contamination and pathogenic microorganisms also determine how they will approach kitchen cleaning and food cleaning. At the same time, the food table is the end the food distribution chain, and consumer’s view of the biological products we design are particularly important. We, therefore, divided the consumer survey into extensive questionnaires and follow-up interviews. Both survey methods have their own advantages and disadvantages, so we decided to use both to form a complementary approach, which is more time consuming but gives us more accurate results.
Aim
1. Questionnaires
A total of 278 valid questionnaires were received from 8 provinces in China using the internet online filling method. We hope to interpret the public's awareness and habits of kitchen cleaning, their knowledge of food cleaning, their attitudes towards food contamination, and their attitudes towards food biomonitoring and cleaning products through the four questionnaires.
Reflection
1. Results of the questionnaires:
We learned from the questionnaire results that the general public has a casual approach to food storage and food cleaning, and lacks knowledge of microbial contamination that is not visible to the naked eye. However, everyone cares about food safety. We also learned from the results that the public expects and worries about biological products, so that we can have a direction to consider the safety of our edible product.
2.Results of Follow-up Interviews：
Phase one：In our interviews with parents in phase one, we found out that in their knowledge of food safety, such that most of their answers come from common sense and experience in daily life, instead of expertise.
Phase two：We intend to make an engineered bacterium, which can achieve the purpose of food protection by inhibiting the quorum sensing of harmful bacteria. Specifically, special proteins secreted by engineered bacteria are added to the food during the production stage. The purpose of the second phase is to understand consumers’ worries and concerns about our product design.
During the interviews, we learned that the people's concerns about our products are mainly focused whether they contain harmful substances that cause harm to the human body, and how to prove the effectiveness of this product. If these concerns are successfully resolved, people are very optimistic about this product and hope that it can be used in supermarkets and homes.
Fig.4 Mrs. Li (left of first row), Mrs. Deng (middle of first row), Mrs. Geng (right of first row), Mrs. Pan (left of second row), Mrs.Wang (right of second row)
Scientists interview
Background
We took a tour of the laboratories College of Food Science and Engineering, Hainan University (HNU) to interview Assoc. Prof. Jian Chen and Dr. Qi Chen, who both have many years of expertise in the field of food hazard factor detection and food safety.
Aim
We hoped to obtain valuable opinions from the two domain experts through a detailed explanation and demonstration of our project technology, and also to seek advice that meet industry norms in terms of product safety.
Reflection
1. Standardized Processes and Official Documents
Led by Dr. Qi Chen, we toured all the laboratories of the College of Food Science and Engineering in HNU and learned that the current the laboratories are equipped with facilities such as PCR testing and microbial enzyme assays, which yield more scientific results but are difficult to use by individuals or supermarkets, and the experts affirmed the uniqueness and convenience of our design.
We also learned that the parties responsible for food safety testing involve governments, food companies, processing companies, and transportation companies, each of which has individual testing methods and tests for different food characteristics, making it difficult to ensure the safety of testing by individuals or groups alone. The laboratory was kind enough to provide us with an important national standard document: Carcass sampling method for microbiological analysis (SN/T4092-2015). This document helped us to understand the guidelines and requirements for raw meat sampling and testing.
Fig.5 Visit the laboratory of the Academy of Food Safety
2. Comments on Experimental Process
We showed the two experts the product design and experiment plans for our team and invited beneficial feedbacks. Two experts thought that we needed to pay attention to these two parts:
1). The relationship between P. aeruginosa concentration and AHL production and the ability of monitoring system we design to capture the signal sensitively and express it smoothly.
2). Considering the limited time and effort, our design can be simpler/more streamlined.
3. Security Validation
Assoc. Prof. Jian Chen believed that there is a long way to go from engineering design to practical application. At this stage, we could try to do a gastric acid simulation experiment to see whether the engineered bacteria could be decomposed into the gastric acid environment, which can explain its safety to a certain extent. We surely implemented this recommendation of the experimental design section.
Fig.6 Dr. Chen made suggestions for our project