For decades, food safety policy has largely operated on a simple principle: break the rules, and/or put consumers at risk and there will be consequences. 

Consequences matter. Enforcement is essential. This is not an argument that we need less oversight or regulation. It’s a proposal for oversight that promotes the prevention-based outcomes we seek. 

There is a fundamental weakness in a system built primarily around penalties: most of the economic rewards still come from producing food faster and cheaper, not necessarily from investing more aggressively in preventing the next outbreak. 

What if we changed that? 

Imagine a food safety “fast pass” — a system in which companies that can demonstrate exceptional, sustained risk management receive tangible trade and economic advantages. 

For domestic growers, that might mean preferential access to federal market development programs, reduced crop insurance costs, grants for infrastructure, such as shared agricultural water monitoring systems, tax incentives for food safety infrastructure investment, or other benefits for operations demonstrating robust risk management, meaningful environmental surveillance, strong traceability and transparent food safety data. 

For imported foods, imagine a verified “green lane.” Importers demonstrating years of strong preventive controls through on-going data sharing based on risks in their region, traceability, transparency and regulatory performance that could receive expedited entry, allow for AI-based monitoring for data anomalies, unified traceability elements and fewer routine inspections that may not drive risk down. This system would allow the regulators to concentrate resources on suppliers and regions presenting data gaps, and potentially greater risk. 

That isn’t deregulation. 

It is risk-based regulation. 

And importantly, the metric cannot simply be “no positives” or “no outbreaks.” That would create incentives to test less, investigate less and report less. We need to stop the passive incentives that drive the exact opposite behavior and outcome that we want. 

The safest operation isn’t necessarily the one that never finds a problem. It may be the one that looks hard enough to find problems early, designs the ongoing monitoring system to alert it when risks are increasing, and demonstrates the risk mitigations it implements— ultimately showing that it knows what to do when it finds them. 

Food safety investments are expensive. Better water systems cost money. More sophisticated surveillance costs money. Traceability costs money. Data infrastructure costs money. 

Yet much of the financial benefit of those investments accrues to the broader food system and public health, while the individual grower or importer bears the cost. This increasing cost burden also comes while our economic system generally rewards those with the cheapest prices. That’s the opposite market incentive we are looking for. 

We shouldn’t eliminate the stick— but maybe food safety needs a much better carrot. 

If we want companies to invest in prevention before the outbreak, perhaps exceptional food safety performance should become more than a regulatory expectation. It needs to become a differentiator and market advantage, ensuring that those who put the effort into prevention are continually rewarded for doing so.