The last decade has witnessed a dramatic increase in the introduction of risk management and safety assurance throughout the UK’s food and feed processing and manufacturing industries. This has resulted in part from changes in legislation, but more significantly it has reflected a fundamental shift in the market environment in which the food-chain industries operate. Risk management was established as a key requirement when the emergence of food safety problems in the 1980s became a matter of public concern. Retailers responded by driving the safety assurance ‘down’ the food-supply chain, and politicians by moving food-chain regulation up their list of legislative priorities.