The Food Standards Agency for the United Kingdom has for the first time published a summary of recent food incidents. It covers the period between October and December 2015.
The list is a summary of alerts issued by the FSA to recall or withdraw products. It also includes information about the agency’s work on foodborne outbreak investigations.
During the final three months of 2015 FSA issued 38 food notices, of which 26 were allergy alerts. The top three undeclared allergens were cereals, milk and mustard. The FSA also supported three foodborne outbreak investigations.
The information published on March 31 describes the overall details of the incident, the level of risk to consumers and what action FSA, industry and/or local authorities took.
The FSA collated this data to make it easier for consumers to access incident information.
Will Creswell, who heads FSA Consumer Protection, said: “We hope this will prove to be a useful tool for people who want to know more about the incidents we handle. It’s a retrospective look, so these aren’t live incidents, but the list will give all the important aspects of food incidents in one place. This is the first quarterly publication with the next quarter covering January to March of this year to be published in May 2016.”
Each year, a small number of incidents or investigations are going to be put forward for a detailed review so that the FSA can make improvements and identify lessons learned.
Today the FSA is also publishing a review of an investigation it handled in September 2014 where there were reports of the presence of soya in wheat flour. The review involved meeting with relevant stakeholders, which led to FSA drawing up a number of recommendations to assist industry and regulators and prevent similar issues from recurring.
