Editorial: Novel approaches for improving safety, health benefits and sustainability of grain based foods

Improving the safety of food products and enhancing beneficial health effects is a necessity and a major challenge. In addition to well established practices, often laid down in ISO based systems and procedures for guaranteeing safety and a constant product quality, new approaches are explored in a wide range of research and development activities - triggered by, for instance, the preference for applying ingredients and processes considered as natural, the need for finding high value application of by-products and by many other factors from practice driven to curiosity driven ones. This issue of Quality Assurance and Safety of Crops & Foods includes a set of papers showing a range of novel approaches, that also may contribute to limit wastes and increase food security and sustainability. © 2016 Wageningen Academic Publishers.