Food Safety Week
Published on 11 November 2023
It’s Food Safety Week (11 to 18 November), so we thought we’d use this opportunity to celebrate the work our food safety team does to promote healthy outcomes for our community.
Our team works tirelessly to provide tailored and relevant educational material and support for our local food businesses, with a focus on ensuring all food shops are preparing and serving safe food.
Their efforts, and the diligence of our local food outlets, is behind the 97% pass rate for local food premises inspections.
A further big tick for everyone involved is we’ve had no notices from the NSW Food Authority for local outbreaks of food borne illnesses.
What does this mean?
Our food shops are using appropriate safe food handling practices and successfully prioritising food safety at the forefront of practice.
Rather than rest on their laurels, our food safety gurus have teamed up with the Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District and our neighbouring councils to deliver a food safety seminar to school canteen workers in the Illawarra.
The session was well received, providing insights into council’s role in food safety, why we conduct food inspections, and what we are looking for.
Our team was also able to provide them with information about the new food safety standards which are being introduced in December.
We encourage local businesses with questions about this new standard to contact our team to discuss the new requirements.
You can also complete the free online training provided by Council, which will help meet one of the three new obligations.
This year’s theme for Food Safety Week is ‘Food Safety – Dollars and Sense’ which explores how to manage the increased cost of living without compromising food safety.
We urge community members and businesses to avoid taking any kind of food safety short cuts that may compromise health as food borne disease can have both short term and lasting negative impacts to health.
Photo: our friendly environmental health team of Julie, Luke and Phoebe