Food Safety Needs a Memory · From Outbreak Response to Longitudinal Genomic Intelligence: What FDA's New CORE+EP Report and Europe's WGS Mandate Change for the Food Industry

Food safety is moving from episodic outbreak response toward persistent, data-linked surveillance. FDA’s CORE+EP 2025 Annual Report, released on 6 October 2026, provides unusually clear evidence: continued sampling after a 2024 cucumber outbreak detected a genetically matching Salmonella strain in 2025; new evidence solved a Listeria outbreak whose illnesses stretched back to 2018; and a complex prepared-meal investigation required ingredient-level traceback across FDA and USDA jurisdictions. Europe has crossed a parallel regulatory threshold. Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/179 became applicable on 23 August 2026, creating obligations for collection and transmission of whole-genome-sequencing data for specified foodborne bacterial isolates associated with outbreaks. The combined signal is larger than WGS itself. Modern food safety requires institutional memory: genomic, traceability, supplier, environmental and process evidence must remain linkable across years. This article proposes a Food Safety Memory Graph and a practical evidence architecture through which manufacturers and ingredient suppliers can convert historical data into earlier detection, faster root-cause analysis and more defensible prevention.