Risk ranking of chemical hazards in foods: comparison of aggregating methods using infant formula as an example

Abstract

The aim of this study was to rank several chemical hazards present in one food item, namely infant formula. We first identified the substances potentially present in infant foods according to the results of the French infant Total Diet Study and to the available scientific literature. Second, we built three criteria to rank the hazards: severity, contribution to the total exposure, and risk characterisation. Each criterion was scored using quantitative or semi-quantitative scales. Third, in order to rank the chemical hazards, two approaches of aggregation of the three criteria were deployed. On the one hand, a multi-criteria decision analysis outranking method and on the other hand a semi-quantitative risk-matrix type method. We then tested these approaches on follow-on formulae for the 7–12 months population, for which contamination data from the French infant Total Diet study were available. The results of both methods showed that the six prioritised substances are the same even if not in the exact same order (acrylamide, inorganic arsenic, furan, chromium VI, lead and PCDD/Fs) demonstrating the robustness of these approaches.