contamination for instance by heat treatments. On the opposite,
assurance activities in a food safety management system have the
objective to provide evidence that products and processes are
within set specifications. Examples of assurance activities are
sampling, validation, verification, documentation (Luning et al.,
2009). Therefore, the food businesses focus on the design and
implementation of food safety management systems to guarantee
food safety as demonstrated in a quantitative European study by
Luning et al. (2015) and a Belgian study by Jacxsens et al. (2014).
Since finished product sampling is valuable in some specific situations,
for instance for traditional lot testing with hold/release or
verification testing (see Buchanan and Schaffner (2015) for a good
discussion on this subject), there is still much focus on finished
product criteria and testing of finished products against set specifications.
However, differences between criteria for products
coming from production lines with different levels of control do not
really exist, although more confidence could be given to a product
from awell-managed processing line than from a batch of products