Objective  To establish a comprehensive capability evaluation indicator system for national food safety risk monitoring technical institutions, providing a tool for assessing the food safety risk monitoring capabilities of monitoring institutions.

Methods Through literature review combined with practical monitoring work, a comprehensive capability evaluation indicator system for national food safety risk monitoring technical institutions was preliminarily constructed across three dimensions: resource support, personnel capability, and monitoring technology. Twelve experts in relevant fields were selected for two rounds of Delphi expert consultation, and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was adopted to calculate the weights of indicators at each level.

Results The two rounds of expert consultation showed the expert positive coefficients of 100.0% and 83.33%, the expert authority coefficients of 0.803 and 0.798, and the Kendall′s coefficients of concordance of 0.187 and 0.287 (indicating good concordance among expert opinions), respectively (all P < 0.001). Following expert consultation, a comprehensive capability evaluation indicator system for national food safety risk monitoring technical institutions was established, comprising 3 first-level indicators, 9 second-level indicators, and 36 third-level indicators. In the two rounds of consultation, experts rated the importance of each indicator at (4.35 ± 0.93) and (4.42 ± 0.66) points, the representativeness at (4.19 ± 0.96) and (4.29 ± 0.66) points, and the feasibility at (4.28 ± 0.99) and (4.38 ± 0.74) points, respectively. The coefficients of variation (CV) for importance, representativeness, and feasibility scores in the first and second rounds were within the ranges of 0.08–0.45 and 0.02–0.22, 0.06–0.40 and 0.05–0.19, and 0.13–0.40 and 0.07–0.23, respectively. Within the constructed evaluation framework, first-level indicator weights ranged from 0.164 to 0.539, second-level indicator weights from 0.121 to 0.667, second-level indicator combination weights from 0.027 to 0.360, third-level indicator weights from 0.046 to 0.667, and third-level indicator combination weights from 0.002 to 0.129.

Conclusions The comprehensive capability evaluation indicator system for national food safety risk monitoring technical institutions developed in this study demonstrates sound scientific validity and reliability. It can serve as a dependable, quantitative tool for assessing the overall capabilities of relevant monitoring technical institutions.