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.
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