Consumer Perception & Awareness on Food Safety in the Developing Countries – A Critical Review

Abstract

World Health Day focuses on demonstrating the importance of food safety along the whole length of the food chain in a globalized world. Food safety is the shared responsibility. It is important to work all along the food production chain from farmers, manufactures to vendors and consumers. Unsafe food creates a vicious cycle of disease and malnutrition, particularly affecting infants, young children, elderly and the sick. Unsafe food is linked to the deaths of an estimated 2 million people annually including many children. There is an urgent need for strengthening the existing food policies to incorporate the importance of food safety, which is ignored most of the times, improving the food governance. This study is based on exploratory research by reviewing available literature on consumer perception and awareness on food safety in developing countries. The food we eat must be nutritious and safe, but we often ignore or overlook the issue of food safety. There is need to Improve the nutrition center in the country, actively spread information and raise consumer awareness about food safety issues. There are other issues related to the costs of implementation of food safety measures and the compliance with the standards which the Government should take care. There is an urgent need for strengthening the existing food policies to incorporate the importance of food safety. The policy makers must include “safe food” as a top priority and integrating “food safety” in the nutrition and food security policies and programs. Good collaboration between governments, producers and consumers helps ensure food safety.

The Influence of certification on perceived product quality of livestock food products

“…All food packaging in the experiment is presented with food labels that provide information about the manufacture/farm and nutritional content of the products and certification from a third party showed additional attributes such as organic or hygiene sanitation as well as assurance not contain any haram material, except for the control group. High perceived quality in all groups was found consistent with a previous study by [16] that showed nutrition labeling is one of the important factors in the consumer decision-making process. The Levene's test on experimental groups both for egg and milk products was not significant (p>0.05).…”

“…Therefore, regardless of the faith practiced, customers who are well-informed on Halal items will be very interested in making additional purchases [19]. Consumers are less interested in NKV certification than they are in Halal certification because, besides assurance of not containing materials that are not allowed to be consumed, Halal certification is also recognized for safety and hygiene assurance [16].…”

“…Understanding the role of third parties is important to increase because as found by [31], unmet standard hygiene sanitation practices in Indonesia are still found in the selection of foodstuffs, presentation, transportation, and personal hygiene of food handlers. This result indicated that concern for hygiene and sanitation aspects could be fulfilled by Halal certification [16]. However, less attention to hygiene sanitation certification showed lower consumers' concern about the hygiene aspect than in developed countries [28,32].…”