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Received Sep 21, 2017; Revised Jan 5, 2018; Accepted Jan 14, 2018
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1. Introduction
In 2016, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China issued guidelines on food safety work. These provisions emphasized improving the quality of edible agricultural products, strengthening risk prevention and control measures, promoting quality management throughout the food supply chain, and accelerating nationally integrated regulations for food safety. These guidelines highlight China’s attention to quality risk management in the food supply chain [1].
Food quality is defined as the access of all people to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life [2, 3]. Food quality covers a broad area that can be characterized by a set of different risk factors [4–6], such as the agricultural conditions [7], production process [8], use of antimicrobials [9], and consumer demand [10, 11]. These factors can be represented by various indicators such as environmental pollution, microbial contamination, logistics, warehousing, and transportation. The risk indicators are related to the food supply chain processes [12] and can be evaluated and documented on the basis of imprecise inputs. The data of these processes are imprecise and difficult to quantify since they pertain to both the resilience of the food supply chain and the consumer demand and supply channels such as retail outlets and restaurants. Therefore, it is difficult to use traditional data-based approaches to evaluate food quality. Addressing this challenge requires the managers to develop some precise methods for assessing the risk level of all factors in every link of the food supply chain [13] and calculating them as a whole [14]. Unfortunately, few related studies have been done.
The quality risk level of food is defined as the potential hazard which is caused by unsafe practices in the food supply chain. The uncertainty of the ability to acquire safe foods is also called food insecurity and can be measured by the risk level of food quality [15]. And the quality risk level of food security is an important problem related to the food supply...