Mars readies for Global Food Safety Center opening

BEIJING, China — Mars is set to open up is Global Food Safety Center — a pre-competitive research and training hub — later this week. The center is slated to open on Sept. 24 just north of Beijing.

The $15 million center will contain microbiology and analytical chemistry laboratories, as well as training laboratories and a conference auditorium. At the GFSC, Mars scientists will use insights and expertise from its partnerships with the World Food Programme, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition and others to look for sustainable and responsible food safety practices.

The GFSC will also use data and insights from Mars’ partnership with IBM and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which saw Mars and IBM sequence and annotate the cocoa genome. In addition to its IBM partnership, Mars also has a longstanding partnership with the University of California, Davis, where is UC Davis–Mars Innovation Institute for Food and Health is housed. The institute looks to find out ways in which NGOs, national laboratories and universities can work together to solve food, health and agriculture issues, the company said. Like the GFSC, all of these were Mars’ pre-competitive efforts.