The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is about to launch a free online tool aimed at small food manufacturing businesses in the UK, to help guide them through the process of identifying food safety hazards and introducing appropriate production controls.
Criminals’ ignorance makes food fraud especially dangerous, according to the chair of the Institute of Food Science and Technology’s (IFST) Food Safety Special Interest Group.
Employee understanding of food safety training is not being checked, which is a big reason why there is “room for improvement” in the field, according to a new survey.
A Northern Irish man was jailed, fined £8,000 and banned from managing poultry processing firms after officials found nine food safety breaches at his business, Upper Erne Lakes Poultry in Newtownbutler.
Healthy reformulation of foods by reducing levels of salt, fat and sugar could increase the risk of food poisoning unless companies know how to do it properly, a leading food microbiologist has warned.
Liverpool University is leading a £2M Food Standards Agency (FSA) project to map the occurrence of norovirus food poisoning across premises and industry workers.
Small processors still face hygiene inspection charges under EU law proposals, despite lobbying to overturn them, prompting an angry reaction from a prominent lobbyist.
Small food and drink firms are outraged by EU proposals to hit them with charges for hygiene inspections, despite previous moves to ensure they would be exempt.
Small food processors would pay for hygiene inspections under proposed EU rules after seeming exempt, and time is running out to block this, according to Bob Salmon, director, Food Solutions.
Arming manufacturers with the key information they need to manage food and drink safety risks is the aim of the Food Manufacture Group’s one-day conference – Safe and legal food in a changing world – due to take place on Wednesday, October 15 2014, at...
The government should urgently restore responsibility to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) for food competition and adulteration in order to improve food safety, according to its former boss Jeff Rooker.
Rapid surface chilling is proving to be an effective technique for reducing campylobacter contamination on poultry, according to the latest results from industry-led trials reported to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) board meeting last month.
The role that factors such as alcohol and antacid consumption and exercise play in people’s susceptibility to having allergic reactions to certain foods is being investigated in a new study by Leatherhead Food Research (LFR).
New rules governing the handling and labelling of food allergens, which come into force later this year, could drive up the number of food alerts issued by the Food Standards Agency (FSA), unless manufacturers and others take urgent action.
Food companies continue to suffer the costly and damaging results of food contamination and food poisoning outbreaks, despite their best efforts to adopt procedures to prevent incidents from happening and mitigate their worst impact when they do.
More needs to be done to improve the understanding of foodborne viral infections such as norovirus, hepatitis A and hepatitis E so that they can be better prevented and controlled, according to scientific experts who advise the Food Standards Agency (FSA).
The government is likely to accept the recommendations from an independent inquiry into last year’s horsemeat contamination scandal, according to Professor Chris Elliott who conducted it and published his interim findings last December.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) lacks the resources to tackle additional food fraud investigation duties recommended by the inquiry into the horsemeat scandal, unless government provides more people and funding.
Food manufacturers have joined retailers, the National Farmers Union (NFU), government bodies and other stakeholders in a new bid to beat campylobacter in raw poultry meat.
Food quality will suffer unless manufacturers put more effort into hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) systems, a leading rice processor has warned.
Trading Standards officers have warned the food industry that potentially cancer-causing dyes have been discovered in confectionery sold in the West Yorkshire region.
DNA testing to detect cat and mouse in processed food, plus species including donkey, dog and horse has won government funding and could be readily available within a year.
David Cameron’s £10M relief fund for flood-struck farmers will help avert the risk of disruption to food supplies, claimed the government, after widespread criticism it was not doing enough to safeguard food supplies.
With ever-tighter environmental health budgets and the looming threat both of greater cost recovery and of privatisation, some experts claim we have all the ingredients for a full-blown food safety crisis.
Trading Standards (TS) don’t have the resources to check for the potentially dangerous unapproved novel foods illegally on sale on the UK market, it has emerged.
Social media is increasingly being used to identify the sources of food poisoning, following its use by investigators from Public Health England (PHE) to narrow down a large multiple pathogen outbreak at an outdoor food festival in Newcastle upon Tyne...
Better intelligence sharing between the food industry and regulators will be needed if another food fraud like last year’s horsemeat scandal is to be averted in future, experts have warned.
Food safety authorities have not ruled out further food poisoning cases after an outbreak of infection from the potentially deadly germ Escherichia coli O157 (E.coli O157) has made seven people ill in Scotland.
A cure for children suffering the misery – and sometimes fatal consequences – of peanut allergy has moved significantly closer, according to a consultant allergist involved in a new ground-breaking study.
Tesco, Sainsbury and 2 Sisters Food Group are among the firms contributing to a report published by Campden BRI designed to tackle the lack of training to fight microbiological food contamination.
A campaign was launched last Friday (January 17) to raise awareness about the risks posed by illegal pesticides sold to farmers in the EU, often by organised criminal gangs from eastern Europe that pass off imports from China masquerading as products...
Food manufacturers, retailers and consumers are walking “blindly” into an obesity epidemic, independent nutritionist Dr Carrie Ruxton has said following a report outlining the UK’s soaring gout problem.
The horsemeat scandal took supermarkets by surprise because they took a complex supply chain too much “on trust” and were over-reliant on paperwork, rather than sampling and close trade relationships.
Factory contamination of food and drink by pathogens and physical contaminants continues to present problems for the industry, according to an assessment of the reasons behind food alerts issued last year by the Food Standards Agency (FSA).
Global pharmaceutical firm Sanofi has said it was the victim of fraud, after French police raided its offices in France and arrested 21 people elsewhere, during investigations into claims that horsemeat used to develop medicines was sold illegally for...
Food safety authorities are racing to trace the source of a Caribbean soft drink linked with a death in Southampton after it was found to contain dangerous levels of cocaine.
A stronger Food Standards Agency (FSA) – equipped with responsibility for food compositional labelling – is a key recommendation of the interim Elliott Review, commissioned by the government to investigate the supply chain after the horsemeat crisis.
Cleveland Meat Company faces £27,000 in fines and legal costs after being found guilty of breaching food safety rules limiting the risk of consumers’ exposure to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
Action is urgently required to address the problem of “super-shedding” cattle and sheep, which are responsible for the majority of contamination of the dangerous foodborne and environmental pathogen Escherichia coli O157 (E.Coli O157), said leading microbiologist...
The food safety watchdog the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has reassured consumers about the “very low risk”, after the first case of the bacteria MRSA was discovered in turkey and chickens on an East Anglian farm.
The effectiveness role of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in promoting food safety and detecting food fraud – such as the horsemeat crisis – plus the urgent need to tackle campylobacter food poisoning took centre stage at Food Manufacture’s Food Safety...
