The Taipei City Government yesterday announced a new standard operating procedure requiring food companies to report food safety issues to the city government within 24 hours of discovering them.
The procedure stipulates that food companies that have been informed of a product recall by a health authority or received a large number of consumer complaints about a product must report the case to the Taipei Department of Health within 24 hours and remove the product from the shelves within 48 hours.
The procedure is to take effect next month and companies that fail to meet the requirement could be fined between NT$30,000 and NT$100,000.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said that members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei (AmCham) at a meeting in January said that there was confusion over the mandatory reporting of problematic food products.
The AmCham members told him that some foreign food companies have set up branches in Taiwan, but they do not clearly understand the requirements about the reporting of food safety problems, Ko said.
He said he asked the department to come up with a clear and feasible standard operating procedure.
According to the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法), food companies must report unsafe or problematic food products to the local health authority, Food and Drug Division Director Wang Ming-li (王明理) said, but added that the definition was not clear enough, so Taipei has taken the first step to clarify it.
Wang said that in a hypothetical case similar to a food scandal involving fipronil-tainted eggs last year, chain supermarkets in the city that had sold tainted eggs would have had to notify the department within 24 hours under the new requirement.
In related news, Taipei residents’ favorite breakfast takeout is sandwiches, followed by hamburgers and danbing (蛋餅, egg pancakes), a survey commissioned by the department has found.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents said that they knew about the city’s ingredient registration platform, the survey of 574 Taipei residents found.
According to the survey, 88 percent of respondents said that disclosing the ingredients on a food product’s packaging and the packaging material increases their willingness to buy the product.
The respondents said their foremost expectation from breakfast restaurant employees is wearing a mask to ensure food hygiene, the poll found.
The department said it also asked breakfast restaurant chains with at least five branches in the city — 24 restaurant operators and 1,000 branches in all — to register the source of the ingredients used in their beverages, as well as sandwiches, hamburgers and danbing, on the department’s online ingredient registration platform.
Actor Darren Wang (王大陸) was sentenced to six months in prison, commutable to a fine, by the New Taipei District Court today for contravening the Personal Data Protection Act (個人資料保護法) in a case linked to an alleged draft-dodging scheme. Wang allegedly paid NT$3.6 million (US$114,380) to an illegal group to help him evade mandatory military service through falsified medical documents, prosecutors said. He transferred the funds to Chen Chih-ming (陳志明), the alleged mastermind of a draft-evasion ring, although he lost contact with him as he was already in detention on fraud charges, they said. Chen is accused of helping a
SECURITY: Starlink owner Elon Musk has taken pro-Beijing positions, and allowing pro-China companies to control Taiwan’s critical infrastructure is risky, a legislator said Starlink was reluctant to offer services in Taiwan because of the nation’s extremely high penetration rates in 4G and 5G services, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said yesterday. The ministry made the comments at a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee, which reviewed amendments to Article 36 of the Telecommunications Management Act (電信管理法). Article 36 bans foreigners from holding more than 49 percent of shares in public telecommunications networks, while shares foreigners directly and indirectly hold are also capped at 60 percent of the total, unless specified otherwise by law. The amendments, sponsored by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Ko
UNREASONABLE SURVEILLANCE: A camera targeted on an road by a neighbor captured a man’s habitual unsignaled turn into home, netting him dozens of tickets The Taichung High Administrative Court has canceled all 45 tickets given to a man for failing to use a turn signal while driving, as it considered long-term surveillance of his privacy more problematic than the traffic violations. The man, surnamed Tseng (曾), lives in Changhua County and was reported 45 times within a month for failing to signal while driving when he turned into the alley where his residence is. The reports were filed by his neighbor, who set up security cameras that constantly monitored not only the alley but also the door and yard of Tseng’s house. The surveillance occurred from July
‘SAME OLD TRICK’: Even if Beijing resumes individual travel to Taiwan, it would only benefit Chinese tourism companies, the Economic Democracy Union convener said China’s 10 new “incentives” are “sugar-coated poison,” an official said yesterday, adding that Taiwanese businesses see them clearly for what they are, but that Beijing would inevitably find some local collaborators to try to drums up support. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, made the remark ahead of a news conference the General Chamber of Commerce is to hold today. The event, titled “Industry Perspectives on China’s Recent Pro-Taiwan Policies,” is expected to include representatives from industry associations — such as those in travel, hotels, food and agriculture — to request the government cooperate with China’s new measures, people familiar with
RSS