Supermarkets will be allowed to use data from their own audits to demonstrate compliance with food hygiene standards under new plans drawn up by the Food Standards Agency (FSA).
The Grocer reported that the FSA will shortly put forward proposals that would see large grocers like Tesco and Sainsbury’s submit data from their third party auditors to inform the food hygiene rating awarded to stores.
Under the ‘scores on the doors’ scheme, food business premises are awarded a score of between zero and five following inspections by local authority food safety officers.
The move to allow retailers to submit their own data reflects a desire on the part of the FSA to focus limited enforcement capacity at those businesses considered as being at high risk of breaching hygiene rules. These include small out of home operators like takeaways and food sold online through social media platforms and other direct-to-consumer channels.
Just over three-quarters (75.7%) of food businesses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland achieved a top rating of five for hygiene in 2022, while 2.9% of businesses achieved a rating of two or below meaning they require improvement, major improvement, or urgent improvement.
In their joint annual review published in October 2023, the FSA and Food Standards Scotland warned that the UK’s ability to carry out critical food safety and standards checks in food businesses was at risk of being undermined by a shortage of key workers like hygiene inspectors and vets.
This has prompted trials with leading grocery retailers to see whether it is possible to make a business level, data-led assessment of their systems and processes, supplemented with some appropriate checks on the ground.
“We’re basically saying there are a small number of retailers with thousands of stores,” outgoing FSA chief executive Emily Miles told The Grocer. “They are doing a huge amount of food hygiene audits using third-party providers. They are low risk and they may be inspected every three years anyway. Over the course of the pilot we have had access to 10,000 store audits compared to what we would have had from local authority inspections, which would have been 1,500. So we’re suddenly getting access to way more information about food hygiene and what is going on.”
Local authorities would still have the ability to carry out inspections of large retailers under the new system, according to Miles, however these would be at a much lower frequency should they validate retailers’ own audit results.
Miles added that, if adopted, the new approach would only apply to retailers initially but she suggested consideration would be given to extending it to cover large out of home businesses like Greggs.
