AVA Food Safety Excellence Award

Have you heard of the AVA Food Safety Excellence Award?

For me, I didn't know about it until I flip through my old newspapers this morning.

(Glass trophy for AVA Food Safety Excellence Award 2010)

This year, the AVA Food Safety Excellence Award was held on the 22 July 2011. The award criteria is as follows:

Food Companies with Single Food Premises

Gold Awards	:	15 consecutive years of 'A' Grades
Silver Awards	:	10 consecutive years of 'A' Grades
Bronze Awards	:	5 consecutive years of 'A' Grades
Certificates of Commendation	:	2 consecutive years of 'A' Grades

The 'A' Grading refer to the grading system for the Food Factory Grading Scheme. 

Food Companies with Multiple Food Premises of the Same Processing Activities:

These criteria are applicable to food companies with additional premises conducting the same food processing activities as an expansion of the business.

1. All premises will be awarded based on the category of award achieved by the original premise provided that all the additional premises have achieved "A" grading since their inception for at least 5 consecutive years.
   
2. If any one of the premises fails to fulfill the requirements mentioned above, each premise will be treated as an individual single food premise and will be awarded individually based on the category of award they have achieved.
   
3. These criteria do not apply to food companies with additional premises acquired through merger. Under this circumstance, each premise will be treated as an individual single food premise and will be awarded individually based on the category of award they have achieved.

(Source: Agri-food & Veterinary Authority of Singapore)

Some of the awardees were being interviewed and published on newspapers, under the SPECIAL part, which caught my attention when flipping through it. 

In an article, AVA announced that the theme to raise public awareness this year is "Food Safety in School and at Work". They will be conducting activities in schools, supermarkets as well as community events. The aim of this theme is to educate school children about good personal hygiene habits in the canteen, and what to look out for when buying food, such as the expiry dates, condition of the packaging etc. They also want to reach out to working adults and educate them on proper food storage in the office pantry, and ways to keep the place clean and tidy. The reason for this is that AVA felt that food safety practices may be neglected in this areas, which people spend a lot of their time at. 

Further reading, I saw that there were quite a few companies are getting this award the second time, which is a good sign to us Singaporean as we know that the safety of the foods from the companies are trustworthy.

After reading, I felt that it is really very important to educate the people about food safety as recently there was a food borne illness outbreak in pre-schools. Besides, during my internship, I when to a few work places to help out in talks done by my colleague. Whenever, we have cooking competitions, the working adults and some parents were unwilling to wear the hair nets or gloves that we provide. Hence, more effort should be put in to raise this awareness. 

Hope that, in future, Singapore will become an EVEN SAFER place, 

in terms of food safety. :)

Cindy Chan
0902991I