On June 16th, the Commission published a Notice providing guidance on food safety management systems for food retail activities, including food donation. This initiative aims to support small businesses such as butchers, bakeries, groceries and ice-cream shops in their implementation of EU rules to ensure the safe production of food sold to the consumer.

The guidance proposes a simple way of implementing these EU requirements. It underlines the value of good hygiene practices that could be sufficient in small retail shops, saving operators from the (quite complicated) procedures based on the hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP) principles. Food safety remains ensured by the guidance, which is largely based on two scientific opinions of the European Food Safety Authority.

Since 2013, EU Member States together with non EU countries Switzerland, Norway and Iceland, exchange information and cooperate in matters where they are confronted with violations of the food chain legislation of cross-border nature. It helps the EU Member States and other European countries to work in accordance with the rules laid down in the Official Controls Regulation.

The so-called EU Food Fraud Network (FFN) facilitates assisting and coordinating communication between competent authorities and transmitting and receiving requests for assistance in these matters. The liaisons bodies are required to exchange information necessary to enable the verification of compliance with EU agri-food chain legislation with their counterparts and, in certain cases, with the Commission, where the results of official controls require action in more than one country.

Risk assessment of chemical mixtures remains a challenging task in all areas of food and consumer safety. So far, no general method has been developed that is best suited to several subject areas (e.g. food contaminants, additives and supplements, plant protection products). Especially for mixtures of food contaminants sophisticated methods are typically not applicable due to a general lack of complete toxicological data sets.

We developed a new approach, the modified Reference Point Index (mRPI), that combines the advantages of the Hazard Index and the Reference Point Index. Furthermore, we developed a decision tree for the determination of specific uncertainty factors that makes the mRPI an easy to use method for cumulative risk assessment even in a data poor field such as food contaminants. To further characterise the estimated cumulative risks, the Maximum Cumulative Ratio (MCR) was adapted to be applied on the mRPI, and the modified Maximum Cumulative Ratio (mMCR) was established to identify whether the risks are dominated by a single substance.

Food Safety Commissioner Stella Kyriakides scaled back the ambition of the EU’s new food policy during a meeting with agriculture MEPs on Monday (11 May), revealing that it will not provide a compulsory EU-wide nutritional food label scheme.

“The Farm to Fork (F2F) will be promoting harmonised labelling, but will not be mandating the type of labelling,” she told the agriculture committee (COMAGRI). She did added though that the upcoming Commission report on front-of-pack nutrition labelling will provide evidence on the need for harmonisation in this area, as under the current EU rules it is only voluntary.

Almost 4,500 kilograms of food has been confiscated by the Belgian food safety agency (FASFC). The agency stressed it has continued efforts to protect public health since control measures for coronavirus were put in place in mid-March.

Vehicle inspections by a unit of the Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain (FASFC) have led to four vans being seized and the destruction of 4,450 kilograms of food such as meat, fish and cheese in the past week.

EFSA has assessed the risks to public health from Listeria contamination of vegetables that are blanched – scalded in hot water or steam for a short time – before they are frozen. They conclude that the risks associated with the consumption of these products is lower than for ready-to-eat foods such as smoked fish, cooked meat, sausages, pâté, soft cheese – which are usually associated with listeria contamination.

Food business operators often blanch vegetables before freezing them because this stops enzyme actions which can cause loss of flavour, colour and texture.