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The study was to evaluate the food safety knowledge and hygiene practices among food handlers. A total of 42 food handlers in 13 basic schools under the School Feeding Scheme, Soweto, South Africa were recruited for the study using purposive and convenience sampling methods for the respondents and institutions, respectively. A piloted self‐administered questionnaire was used. All the respondents were female (100%) with the majority being between the ages of 31 and 40 (40%) and had secondary education (63%). About (90.5%) of the respondents indicated that food safety is very important. Frequent hand washing (95.2%); cleaning and sanitizing knives/cutting boards (95.3%); checking best before date (92.8); keeping kitchen surfaces clean (80.9%) among others were indicated as very important food safety and hygiene practices. However, they failed to agree that frozen foods, particularly meat are to be thawed using room temperature (4.8%) and also in the lower shelf in the refrigerators (26.2) as the best practices. Spearman's correlation coefficient revealed that no correlation exists between food safety knowledge and hygiene practices (p < .05), but strong correlations among educational levels, knowledge, and practices (p < .05). Hence, training and workshops particularly in hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) is needed to cover‐up the lapses.

In recent years, incidences of food poisoning have been reported in some schools across the country. However, little attention has been paid to the hygiene practices of food vendors in the schools. This study, therefore, investigates the food safety knowledge and practices of food vendors catering for tertiary and second cycle students in the Ho municipality. The piloted and validated questionnaire used to sample 608 respondents revealed that the majority of the respondents sampled were female (76.0%), between the ages of 26 and 40 (51%), married (47.4%), and have tertiary or senior high school certificate (60.7%). They have been in business for not more than 2 years (36.2%) and had neither food safety (62.3%) nor good manufacturing practice (81.9%) training. However, they have sufficient knowledge in food safety regarding purchasing, storage, cooking and reheating, and personal hygiene, but exhibited poor knowledge and practice of food temperature control protocols. Both Kendall's tau‐b coefficient correlation and linear regression model revealed a significant positive correlation between food safety knowledge and practices of the vendors. Nevertheless, regular training and monitoring are necessary to enable the vendors to fully implement the food temperature control protocols, which is one of the major causes of food poisoning in the country.

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