Food Production, Quality and Registration

How we Protect the Public Health

Over 3,000 people in Southend suffer from food poisoning every year. That's not only a lot of discomfort, but when people are incapacitated it also wastes a lot of money. On rare occasions, food poisoning can kill. Normally, the precautions that will stop food poisoning happening in restaurants and in the home are fairly simple ones, yet many people are still not learning the lessons. The main purpose of the Council's team of food specialist Environmental Health Officers is to protect all people in the Borough, whether residents, workers or visitors, from food related ill health. Enforcing the relevant laws is a very important part of this work, but so too is giving advice to businesses and to food handlers in the home.

The Public

This Council deals with food safety and standards at a local level. We are unlikely to be able to help you with issues decided at a national level such as BSE policy, Foot & Mouth policy, GM Food policy etc. However, the links to the Food Standards Agency site and the Farm to Fork site might help you to find the information you want on such subjects. Council officers (with a great deal of training and experience) try to inspect all food businesses. The time interval between inspections is determined for each business by how much risk that business represents. Our aim, and that of the Food Standards Agency, is to make sure that every food business is "self-regulating".

The law requires all food business operators to find out for themselves what they must do to ensure that their food is safe. They must carry out a systematic assessment of what things in their business could result in health or quality problems, and what control measures they need to put in place. When they have decided upon their safe procedures, they must then make sure that the staff know and understand what they must do to keep food safe. Checks need to be made to ensure that the correct procedures are always properly carried out.

The Meat Products (England) Regulations 2003 (Regulation 5) changed the meaning of "meat" in the Food Labelling (Amendment) (England) Regulation 2003. Products made from meat must show a "quantitative ingredient declaration" (QUID) percentage for each species of meat used. A guidance leaflet is available in our related downloads section on the right for further information. QUID calculations can be complicated and this calculator, also found in the related downloads section, has been created to help small manufacturers comply with QUID regulations for meat products.