What is food hygiene?
The definition of food hygiene refers to the practices that a business applies to protect consumers from any risks of foodborne illnesses that bacterial contamination or spoilage can cause, such as: food handling, preparation, and storage. Particularly, food hygiene deals with the biological aspect of keeping food safe.
Food hygiene is a collection of practices and guidelines to keep your operations clean and under healthy conditions.
What are the objectives of food hygiene?
This term is concerned with food handling, transport, proper storage of food, and the actual processing of your materials. Specifically, the objectives of food hygiene include the following:
- To prevent food from spoiling due to contamination as a result of unclean environmental conditions, poor food hygiene practices, and lack of orientation on food safety.
- To orient and educate people involved in the processing of your product on how to practice safe food handling and sanitary practices.
- To extend the shelf-life of your product through clean processing.
- To prevent releasing unsafe food to the market that can result in foodborne illnesses.
Achieving and maintaining food hygiene is an essential task for every food business, wherever the business is in the world.
Is food hygiene the same as food safety?
Technically, they are not the same. Although, in some cases, food manufacturers use these terms interchangeably, they have different meanings and have different principles.
Food safety includes a wide range of areas to ensure that food is safe and fit for human consumption. This term is used to describe a wide management system that is applied by a food business to ensure that hazards are controlled to acceptable levels.
Food safety is concerned with all types of hazards and includes the system of corrective actions, monitoring, and how to achieve safe operations. In short, food safety is the bigger umbrella, and food hygiene is under it. Food hygiene is the practice of doing the directives from food safety in the cleanest and safest way possible.
Food safety refers to a holistic approach to controlling and managing food safety hazards. It spans from sourcing raw materials, processing, food packaging, transporting, and finally, until the products are ready for sale. During processing, food is vulnerable to biological, physical, chemical, and allergy contamination.
Food hygiene standards mainly cover conditions, rules, and procedures to prevent biological food contamination, leading to foodborne illnesses. The measures range from proper food handling, thorough cleaning process, preventing cross – contamination, etc. In comparison, traceability and correct food labelling are part of food safety management but not necessarily in food hygiene standards.
While food safety encompasses a broader perspective, including hazards beyond hygiene, food hygiene specifically emphasises the cleanliness and sanitation practices necessary to maintain safe and hygienic food handling.
In conclusion, it could be said that food hygiene is a part of food safety as it goes deeper into sanitation practices, which are fundamental to food safety. It is important to remember that both concepts are essential to ensure the safety and quality of food.
