Are you checking your food is up to standard?

Consumer confidence and trust in food is about more than providing safe food. Consumers are increasingly, and often passionately, concerned about the content of their food, where it comes from and how it has been produced. Regulators refer to this aspect of this aspect of consumer protection as ‘food standards,’ as opposed to ‘food hygiene’ control.

Food standards and food hygiene control. What’s the difference?

Food standards regulation covers issues such as food composition, accuracy of labelling and associated claims made about the food on menus or packaging. This is distinct from food hygiene considerations or the food’s microbiological safety. What’s more, local food standards controls are generally delivered by council Trading Standard’s services not Environmental Health services, although in larger metropolitan and unitary authorities the services are often combined.

Whilst the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme provides consumers with access to food hygiene information, allowing them to make more informed choices about where they might want to eat, it is much more difficult for consumers, and indeed food businesses, to make consistent judgements about food standards compliance by visual means. In many cases it is only through sampling and other analysis that issues can be identified, so consumers rely on food businesses having the right systems in place as well as an effective regulatory regime to identify and address risks in providing general confidence that food is safe. Worryingly, in spite of the increased consumer concern about food standards, economic pressures on food businesses heightening risks in this area and a number of high-profile incidents of food fraud, food adulteration and inaccurate/misleading labelling of food, Local Authority resources to support and regulate food business activity in this area have shrunk significantly in recent years.

Local Authority enforcement returns show some authorities have cut their resources for food standards enforcement by upward of 40% in recent years. The returns also show a reduction in routine checks of food businesses and local food standards sampling activity and testing. Although some of the reduction in inspections and sampling can reasonably be explained by better use of intelligence and targeting, there are real concerns about the current effectiveness of UK food standards controls.

Taking back control

As a result of the findings the FSA are reviewing the current regulatory delivery model for food standards and considering proposals at their forthcoming 19th June Board meeting to improve and modernise these controls. The proposals follow discussion with relevant government departments including Defra and BEIS, who respectively lead on food labelling and Primary Authority.

Some of the key changes currently being considered and detailed in the Board paper are:

Greater centralised intelligence gathering toward an even more intelligence led approach
Closer local authority working with the FSA’s National Food Crime Unit
Increased FSA support and training for enforcement officers
More strategic sampling and surveillance
A new risk rating approach for the supply chain
More integrated enforcement of food hygiene and food standards at the local level.

Ultimately, of course, the responsibility for the standard of any food or drink provided to customers rests with the food business. The FSA are simply looking at the effectiveness of the official checks by the regulator to ensure businesses have carried out their responsibilities, so consumers and in certain cases potential trading partners can be confident UK food is what it says it is. In this context, the FSA’s wider regulatory modernisation programme is seeking to place greater responsibility on businesses being able to demonstrate their compliance and potentially share their compliance information with regulators. This will allow the FSA and local authorities to better target interventions to those businesses without effective controls or systems in place. Future food standards regulatory delivery will undoubtedly fit into that approach.

Many catering and retail food businesses are currently more focussed on food hygiene and safety controls than food standards issues. This reflects current local authority prioritisation as well as the undoubted criticality of food safety and the benefits of having a good FHRS hygiene rating. However, it is important that food business’s make checks on the food they are ordering and selling, to ensure it complies with the necessary food standard’s requirements relating to content, provenance and labelling. This is especially important given the complex and dynamic nature of supply chains and competitive pressures in the food sector, increasing the risk of being supplied with and potentially selling adulterated, substandard or incorrectly labelled products. Recent incidents have shown how quickly problems in this area can damage the reputation and viability of food businesses.

So, it’s not just the FSA who should be reviewing food standards controls. If you own a food business, large or small then you should be too. Fortunately, there are some simple, practical safeguards and systems you can put in place and at Dynamic Risk Indicator we can help you manage compliance with our award-winning operational software solutions. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help.