We are the UK's leading provider of health, safety and environmental risk management consultancy services. Call Santia today on 0845 5040 402
We are the UK's leading provider of health, safety and environmental risk management consultancy services. Call Santia today on 0845 5040 402
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According to the Food Standards Agency’s latest public attitudes tracker, the main food safety issue that continues to cause concern is food hygiene when eating out.
Other issues that perturb the general public include food poisoning and the use of additives in food.
Businesses should be more concerned than ever about public attitudes to food hygiene, as anybody worried about hygiene when eating out are now able check the online rating scheme operated in partnership with the Food Standards Agency.
The scheme is designed help people choose where to eat out or shop for food by giving information about the hygiene standards in restaurants, pubs, cafes, takeaways, hotels, and other places you eat out. Supermarkets and other food shops are also included in the scheme.
In this latest tracker survey, three new questions were asked to measure people’s awareness of food hygiene schemes. The results show that 19% of respondents had seen or heard about this type of scheme. When prompted, 21% of respondents reported that they had seen or heard about the ‘Food Hygiene Rating scheme’, 12% had seen or heard about ‘Scores on the Doors’ and 10% had seen or heard about the ‘Food Hygiene Information Scheme’.
When a business is inspected by a food safety officer from the local authority, they are given a ‘hygiene rating’. This rating shows how closely the business is meeting the requirements of food hygiene law and the database can be found at http://ratings.food.gov.uk/.
Knowing that anybody can look up the hygiene rating of a food premises before they decide to spend any money, sends a clear signal to all employers in this sector to get food safety right.
One of the most important ingredients in food safety is staff competence. Training is vital in ensuring that correct procedures are followed; and providing workers with the basic knowledge of the importance of general food hygiene is the first step.
However, the recipe to success may not be complete for many employers, unless they go further than this and start to consider more detailed issues such foreign body prevention, allergen segregation or metal detection.
By taking such a step, food businesses will be protecting their customers and their reputations, as well as the bottom line.
Santia Food Safety Services delivers a range of its own tailor made consultative training courses that meet your specific priorities and business needs. Our experience shows that generic courses fail to identify and address the fundamental issues on food manufacturing sites and we believe that it is essential to understand and apply real world solutions to individual site requirements.
Santia Food Safety Services courses are tailored to your specific needs by ensuring our training staff are fully briefed in advance and have gathered real world examples from your factory to illustrate and support the training material. The following 1 Day on-site training courses are offered based on this principle:
With erisk, Santia’s online health and safety management system, the full range of disciplines relating to health and safety, including fire safety through to the management of asbestos, environmental control and occupational health are clearly presented on one screen. Further details can be found here.
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Cleanliness promotes healthiness and good, healthy food. This is always the main priority when eating out. Also, In the light of the recent horse meat scandal, it is important now for organisations to check their procedures and make a difference to stop this happening again. We can hope that this will lead to more food hygiene training and more awareness in companies of what they are being supplied. You cannot put a price on peace of mind.