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Their comments came as the United Nations launched a new report here urging China to improve its food safety record by creating an overall watchdog, setting clear laws, and ensuring the prompt sharing of information.
Experts said China's current food safety system was not only 'old-fashioned' in its obsession with product testing, but also 'disjointed'.
'A disjointed system with dispersed authority between different ministries resulted in poor communication and a prolonged outbreak with late responses,' said Mr Jorgen Schlundt, director of WHO's department of food safety, zoonoses and foodborne diseases.
'If there had been better detection and follow-up actions, this problem would not have been as severe,' he added, in reference to the scandal over melamine-tainted milk power and dairy products.
News emerged last month that tens of thousands of babies across China had fallen ill after taking Chinese milk powder contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical used in plastics and fertilisers.
The revelation prompted many countries to clear such products from shop shelves, dealing yet another major blow to the Made-in-China brand, which had already been battered by a series of safety scandals in the past year involving pet food, dumplings, beans and fish.
The Chinese government responded by sacking errant local officials and dairy company executives, and aggressively stepped up its testing of domestic milk and milk-based products in a bid to restore consumer confidence.
In the initial weeks after the scandal first broke in mid-September, there were almost daily announcements about how the latest tests showed that Chinese dairy products were safe.
But experts said such exhaustive tests were not necessarily effective.
Said Mr Tony Hazzard, a WHO adviser on food safety: 'End-product testing is not the correct way to ensure food safety. You can sample only so much. Even if you sample one batch, you can get different results.'
In the case of the melamine scandal, a testing regime would not have picked out the chemical because no dairy company was looking out for such a contaminant and no government had required the dairy products to be tested for melamine.
'On the other hand, if they had a coordinated system all through the supply chain, the business management of (the Chinese dairy companies) should have been able to walk back along their supply chain and seen that there were these bags of melamine,' added Mr Hazzard.
Instituting a coordinated system, or what the experts call the 'farm to table' approach that encompasses the production, processing, distribution and retail aspects, would not be easy, given the scale and characteristics of China's food industry.
China has about 450,000 food and food processing companies, of which 70 per cent comprise of small enterprises with fewer than 10 employees, according to the UN report. In addition, there are many more unregistered producers which are even harder to regulate or oversee.
However, the report, as well as the WHO experts, expressed confidence in the Chinese government's commitment to improving its food safety record.
Mr Hazzard noted that the businesses had ultimate responsibility for food safety, not the government.
He told reporters: 'The burden should absolutely be on the businesses as they are the ones making the profits. They have the due responsibility (for food safety).
'Government systems are there to enforce, but they cannot assure...They don't have inspectors in premises every hour every day. They can't test every sample of every product.'
In the latest development, South Korea said yesterday that powdered egg and other processed egg products from China had been found to contain minute traces of melamine.
