Shanghai will launch an "exhaustive food safety management platform" to monitor the operations of food companies and accept public complaints, the city's food safety watchdog said yesterday.
The food safety information management and service platform will include a dozen existing systems of the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration on license issue, supervision, punishment and inspection, the administration said in a report to local legislators.
The integrated data will be analyzed and shared between city and district-level watchdogs to better ensure the city's food safety, said Yang Jingsong, director with the administration.
The data collected by the new platform will also support food safety management decision-making and help to cope with emergency food safety incidents, he added. The local FDA has spent three years setting up the comprehensive platform.
It is currently under the final evaluation and will be officially launched soon, Yang said.
As a key part of the platform, a food tracking system that consumers and officials can check the planting, transporting and production information of food, has been established with more than 28,000 local food related companies registered, according to the FDA.
These companies have uploaded some 110 million pieces of food-related information "from the farmland to the dining table," Yang added.
The tracking system operated by the state-owned Shanghai INESA Group has included real-time monitoring on the collection, transport and treatment on used kitchen oil to cut the use of the swill oil, he said.
"In the next step, the FDA will include more agricultural products from out of Shanghai and imported products into the tracking system," Yang told legislators.
Surveillance cameras will be installed in more restaurants and at food manufacturers.
Over 80 percent of the high-risk food firms handling dairy, meat and vegetable oil production have had cameras installed for real-time supervision of their operations, the FDA said.
"In future, consumers will be able to check the production process of the food they purchased on their smartphones," Yang said. A trial operation has begun on some school canteens, food delivery companies, medium and large size hotels as well as chain restaurants.
Local restaurants are also encouraged to install glass walls in their kitchens to display the cooking processes to consumers, he said. More intelligence supervision skills such as face recognition, temperature monitoring and risk alerting will be applied to the kitchens.
