Beyond Compliance: Redefining Food Quality and Safety from Hippocratic Dietetics to Food Exposomics, Chemical Mixtures and Future Food Systems

Food quality has traditionally been assessed through compliance with legal requirements, microbiological and chemical safety, nutritional value, and control of individual contaminants. Contemporary food systems, however, require a broader perspective that also considers matrix complexity, processing, chemical mixtures, long-term exposure, emerging technologies, and variation in consumer responses. This narrative-conceptual review, supported by a structured literature search, reframes food quality from a beyond compliance perspective and develops three related propositions. Food quality under uncertainty addresses incomplete knowledge concerning the chemical space of food, mixture effects, actual exposure, and emerging technologies. Sub-threshold multi-contaminant burden describes recurrent co-exposure profiles in which individual contaminants remain below their regulatory limits, without implying inherent harm, but highlighting the need for improved monitoring, modeling, and cumulative exposure assessment. The New Food Quality Compass organizes quality as a multidimensional profile integrating safety, nutritional value, bioactivity, processing, contaminants, authenticity, sustainability, personalization, and trust. Future assessment should combine targeted, suspect, and non-target analysis with foodomics, exposomics, consumption data, and risk–benefit interpretation. The beyond compliance perspective extends conventional safety control toward a more integrated framework linking food composition, chemical exposure, uncertainty, public health, and future food systems.