The CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) estimates that each year 48 million people fall sick from a food-borne illness, 128,000 people get hospitalized, and 3,000 people die.

In a real-world case of a food safety concern, E. coli was discovered in spinach in the USA in 2006. As a result, spinach was pulled from every store across the country. It took two weeks to trace the source: 1 day's shipment of 1 lot from 1 supplier. In the meantime, there were at least 199 people who fell ill and 3 people died.

More recently, in March 2017, there was a huge scandal in Brazil involving the largest meat processing companies in the country. In an operation by Brazil's Federal Police called Carne Fraca, these companies were accused of tampering with the meat and selling it locally and outside the country. The corporations took weeks to respond to these accusations because of the difficulty accessing the data that was necessary to provide answers.