What do customers and business really think about food safety?

I automatically look for things like cleanliness and temperatures when I am buying food, whether it be in a supermarket or a restaurant.

But I live food safety. A recent survey of 2000 consumers in the UK, seems to indicate that I am not normal.

The Food Standard Agency’s (FSA) runs a biannual survey to determine the public’s perception of food safety, amongst related issues.

The latest of these surveys shows that more people are concerned about chemicals and additives in food that in food safety. Food safety hit only 28 prcent as the biggest food related issue, environmental chemicals was at 30 percent and food additives was 29 percent.

Salmonella was found to be the most well known type of food pathogen with consumers at 91 percent, with the following in order; E.coli (85 percent), Norovirus (56 percent), and Listeria (51 percent).

Food poisoning from Campylobacter is the most common in the UK (and indeed also here in Australia) but the survey found that only 24 percent of those involved had heard of it.

So what foods were thought to be the big ones when it comes to food poisoning; poultry hit 79 percent and the following in order were; shellfish (55 percent), reheated takeaway food (46 percent) and eggs (37 percent).

So consumers don’t really get the food safety message and to the health departments across the world trying to get that message through, the results from this survey should be a wake up call – whatever method is currently being used is not working.

But what about business? Do staff really understand the importance of food safety?

The Food Safety Assurance and Advisory Council (FSAAC) and the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) in New Zealand recently ran a telephone survey of 900 food businesses and the results are in many ways alarming.

Only 3% of those food businesses surveyed  reported data on their food safety performance back to their employees – so for most food businesses the staff don’t know what is going on in terms of food safety and why it is happening.

No food safety is ever going to be truly effective in a food business if the staff do not have buy in.

The Chair of the FSAAC, Michael Ahie said; “Food safety must be treated as a way of doing business and not just something that is discussed at a weekly meeting. This initial research provides a baseline that will be valuable for tracking improvements over time.”

Just as  concerning is the result that even though 95 percent of those surveyed had food safety related policies, only 69 percent actually had specific goals and key performance indicators to support those policies.