Food authority widens food safety net

Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority is expanding its new food safety programme for 3,400 small eateries

Customers having their lunch at a small restaurant on Shaikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum street in Abu Dhabi.

Abu Dhabi: The Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority (Adfca) is expanding its new food safety programme for 3,400 small eateries in the emirate which cater daily to around 340,000 people who mostly belong to low- and lower-middle income groups.

The number of food safety violations found by the Adfca inspectors at small eateries has gone down since the authority implemented a new system, ‘Salamat Sadna’ (safety of our food), a senior official told Gulf News on Tuesday.

It offers a simple method to maintain safe practices and record essential food safety information, said Dr Mariam Hareb Sultan Al Yousuf, executive director of policy and regulation at Adfca.

“We pay more attention to this category because they cater to a large number of people. And the number of such eateries is going up considerably,” she said.

“There were around 2,500 small eateries in the emirate by the end of 2013, which has gone up to 3,400 now,” the official said.

Eateries with less than 10 employees and up to 50 seats, offering around 100 meals a day, comes under the category of small eateries, she said on the sidelines of an event to launch the special edition of the Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes (WHATT) Journal published by Emerald Group. Seven scientific articles in the journal focusing on various government strategies in the hospitality industry tell the success story of Abu Dhabi emirate in improving food safety.

Mariam Al Khaja, project manager of Salamat Sadna, said officials have imparted lessons on Safe Operating Practices (SOPs) to food handlers at 1,200 small eateries in the first phase and the remaining eateries will be covered in the next phases. Although the officials taught a few SOPs only to food handlers, they made an overall improvement in Good Hygienic Practices (GHP).

One of the SOPs stipulates that food handlers should keep their nails short and avoid using nail polish, jewellery and wristwatches, which may hide dirt on their hands. Food handlers learn safe practices in cooking, chilled storage, cleaning high-risk surfaces, washing fruit and vegetables, when and how to wash hands, protective clothing, personal hygiene, handling ready-to-eat foods, among others.

Dr Mariam said this is part of implementing the International HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) standards, which were made mandatory as a federal policy in the UAE for four- and five-star hotels and the food manufacturing sector since 2001. Adfca started implementing it for catering businesses since 2010 and small eateries in 2014.

There are 160 hotels and hotel apartments, and 9,000 catering businesses in the emirate, another senior official told Gulf News.

Of the hotels and hotel apartments, 133 are in Abu Dhabi, 17 in Al Ain and 10 in the Western Region, said Ahmad Saeed Al Kaabi, Catering Control Section Manager at Adfca.

HACCP is a preventive approach to food safety and pharmaceutical safety that addresses physical, chemical and biological hazards as a means of prevention rather than inspection of finished products.

The Food and Drug Administration of the US and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) say that their mandatory HACCP programmes for juice and meat are an effective approach for food safety and protecting public health.

In view of the linguistic diversity and inability to read or write in English or Arabic among managers and workers in food businesses in the UAE, the project was developed using photographs with a minimum number of words. The majority of managers (69 per cent) and food handlers (73 per cent) here speak southern Asian languages such as Urdu, Hindi and Malayalam.