In September 2024 the United States Food and Drug Administration awarded Illinois Tech’s Institute for Food Safety and Health (IFSH) $3.9 million for the first of a five-year cooperative agreement renewal continuing to support its history of success working toward safer and more wholesome food.

“This continued support indicates that the previous thirty-five-year FDA-Illinois Tech collaboration has been a sound investment” says Brian Schaneberg, IFSH executive director.

In 1988 the National Center for Food Safety and Technology (NCFST) was established to bring together the food safety and technology expertise of academia, industry, and government to support research and outreach efforts enhancing the protection of the food supply for U.S. consumers.

Illinois Tech formed IFSH in April 2011, where NCFST continues to operate as a primary research center coordinating the collaborative research programs in food safety and applied nutrition among the FDA, Illinois Tech, and the member companies. In addition to NCFST, other centers within the IFSH structure are the Centers for Processing Innovation, Nutrition Research, and Specialty Programs.

With an increasingly diverse domestic and global food supply, food continues to face complex old and emerging safety issues. To address this challenge, the FDA has created a new, stronger, and more unified Human Foods Program (HFP) with a more robust and effective risk-management framework. The revolutionized HFP should be able to systematically identify, assess, and prioritize any harmful and public health issues. The agency is charged with mitigating and aligning resources accordingly. Some of these complex issues can be effectively addressed by further strengthening the available science-based programs established through IFSH.

The FDA also believes that innovative research and outreach programs such as those established at IFSH can further support the development of proactive approaches to the prevention of food safety problems before they occur.

The FDA’s New Era of Food Safety initiatives—implemented in 2020 and based on the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA)—have emphasized the increasingly important collaboration with IFSH and other centers of excellence as the FDA fulfills its mandate to develop smarter tools needed for a prevention-based food safety system.

Developing and strengthening public-private partnerships for research and outreach on preventive controls is considered a key element of the FDA’s new people-led, technology-enabled implementation strategy.

This cooperative agreement will provide continued support so that IFSH can meet the following objectives:

1. Carry out multidisciplinary applied research projects on pre- and postharvest processing preventive control measures, on food processing and packaging technologies, on the impact of these processing strategies on the nutritional quality of food, and on laboratory method performance (including method validation) that address research needs associated with FDA-regulated products, that fill knowledge gaps identified in prevention strategies, and that are consistent with the Deputy Commissioner of Food’s vision for the implementation of the new Human Foods Program Science and Research Strategic Plan.
2. Maintain and facilitate the further development of the IFSH collaborative research program by leveraging resources among U.S. government agencies, universities (including other Illinois Tech components), and the food industry to achieve practical FSMA-based, technology-enabled New Era of Food Safety solutions to food safety and food processing issues.
3. Engage with stakeholders to develop and implement training, outreach, and communication programs to identify research needs and to facilitate the use of the information produced by the research program.
4. Support the implementation of the new unified HFP FSMA-based New Era of Food Safety priorities through research, education, and outreach, with emphasis on the development of strategies for prevention, exploration of opportunities for data sharing, and adoption of root cause analysis into agency post-response efforts associated with the safe and sustained manufacturing, processing, packing, and holding of food