Purdue researcher awarded $10M for extension of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Haley Oliver, professor of food science in Purdue University’s College of Agriculture, has been awarded $10 million in funding from United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for a five-year extension of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL).

Since the lab’s founding in 2019, Oliver — who also serves as the FSIL director and the university's interim vice provost for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars — and the FSIL management team at Purdue and Cornell universities have guided more than a dozen food safety research projects in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria and Senegal. Research has focused on strengthening the safety of nutritious, perishable foods including dairy, produce, fish and poultry.

Oliver, a 150th Anniversary Professor, said the lab’s overall goal is to support data-driven policies and practices to prevent illnesses caused by microbial foodborne pathogens.

“Globally, foodborne illness has a public health impact comparable to better-known threats such as malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis,” Oliver said. “However, producers, consumers and governments are often less aware of the risk posed by microbial pathogens, which have a significant impact on cycles of disease, malnutrition and food insecurity.”

FSIL’s initial phase addressed critical food safety gaps, including identifying key pathogens and assessing the current food safety knowledge, attitudes and practices of consumers and small-scale producers, processors, and vendors in the six target countries. Several projects used food safety economics to understand market-level dynamics, such as consumers’ willingness to pay more for safer food to offset higher production costs. Phase two will target research to facilitate food safety behavior change and policy development in Cambodia, Nepal and Kenya.

“These three countries have food policy landscapes well positioned for food safety progress but face gaps in consumer awareness of food safety risks coupled with limited food safety training for producers and vendors,” Oliver said. “There is less recognition of food safety as a public health priority and a clear need to strengthen food safety surveillance and enforcement infrastructure.”

The lab recently launched a new poultry food safety project in Kenya and has commissioned a team of Purdue researchers to conduct food safety surveys in the three focus countries. The survey project is led by Valerie Kilders, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics; with collaborators Nicole Olynk Widmar, interim head and professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics; and Paul Ebner, interim head and professor in the Department of Animal Sciences. The surveys will capture consumer perspectives on food safety including their attitudes towards risk, potential food safety policies and initiatives, and the demand and willingness to pay for safer foods.

Additional projects will be funded through a competitive Request for Applications process to be launched later this year. The research will address three areas: increasing consumer awareness of, and demand for, safer food; empowering governments to generate and use meaningful food safety data; and motivating private-sector adoption of safe food production practices.

“Our goal is to identify actionable consumer, government and private-sector strategies that will influence the demand for safer food and food safety regulations,” Oliver said. “Partnering across these three sectors is crucial to reducing the global burden of foodborne disease.”