With rapid economic growth and subsequent improvements in quality of life, especially in developing countries, food quality and safety has become an increasingly important issue in the world. Though today’s global food supply chains have brought remarkable benefits such as cost reduction and food accessibility, they have also posed significant challenges. For example, vastly distributed “siloed” information as well as information asymmetry along the supply chain can lead to problems in food quality and/or safety. Meanwhile, thanks to the rapid advancement in information and communication technologies, the amount of data that is collected by businesses along the food supply chain has exploded recently (i.e., so-called “big data”) which offers great opportunities for addressing problems such as information asymmetry and lack of useful information for decision making.

Big data technology (BDT) can be used to address short- to long-term problems related to food quality and safety. Particularly, BDT holds the potential of promoting strategic collaboration among all stakeholders in the food system, including consumers, retailers, producers, and governments. Moreover, through integration with food traceability systems, BDT can help to improve the transparency of the entire food supply chain, covering materials and food production, logistics, consumption, and waste management. All in all, BDT could pave a new avenue to decision support in terms of how food systems are governed and how food safety risks are assessed and managed.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to collate high-quality research and review articles that seek to address food quality and safety problems in an environment where big data is accessible. We hope that through this Special Issue, academics, practitioners, and government policy makers can be much better informed about the problems related to food quality and safety, and possible solutions to these problems based on the analysis of big data.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Food safety risk identification based on big data
• Identification of consumers’ food safety preference based on big data
• Applications of big data in food supply chain optimisation
• Intelligent monitoring technology of food quality
• Blockchain in the food industry
• Traceability in the food industry
• Bid data for decision making in food supply chains
• Transparency in food supply chains
• Early warning technology of food safety
• Multivariate food data integration technology
• Food safety information disclosure methods
• Food safety information sharing mechanism
• Multi-agent collaborative supervision mechanism of food safety