Ask any food industry executive to cite his or her greatest concern, and the answer will almost always be the same: product safety. But the list doesn't stop there. Like any other business sector, food manufacturers are grappling with a number of challenges, many of them related to the age of the internet and social media.

As tainted-food scandals go, it wasn't so bad. The discovery early this year of unlabeled horse meat in European food products wasn't for the most part a safety issue. It was a violation of cultural norms, to be sure, as well as a truth-in-packaging problem. Most of all, it was a supply-chain failure.