Food Safety Week partners

The Agency has been working closely with a variety of partner organisations to disseminate food safety messages and organise activities. More information about some of these organisations can be found below.

Kids from schools around England have been helping the Food Standards Agency raise awareness of good food hygiene in the home. Armed with video cameras, they have been recording ‘what goes on behind closed doors’ when buying, storing, preparing and cooking food.

Videos from five pupils from Bournville Secondary School, Christleton High School, Darton High School and The Woodroffe School, were included in the Food Safety Week DVD called ‘Kitchen confidential’.

The students looked at a number of scenarios including what’s in the fridge, what goes on in the kitchen and the grubby details of how food is really cooked and prepared. The results highlight both good and bad practices with a focus on the potential dangers of ignoring ‘use by’ dates and of cross-contamination.

Penny Chapman from Christleton High School, Chester said: ‘Being involved in such a significant project showed off the confidence and willingness of the students to engage. It was a lot more difficult than they first thought, but they really enjoyed seeing the finished project.’

The Chilled Food Association (CFA) is supporting Food Safety Week and the FSA's online food safety resources. The CFA is launching www.chillededucation.org, which is designed to provide CFA members with 12 lesson plans and resource material they can deliver at Key Stages 1 to 4 on topics including food hygiene. The site will also highlight the great variety of careers in the chilled prepared food sector and where to do Food Science-related degree courses. Lesson plans for teachers are to be developed and included on the site.

The CFA's main site (see link at the bottom of the page) gives a lot of information on hygiene, safety, labelling and sustainability issues in its 'media' section.

Deaf Connections, a Glasgow based charity that enables deaf and hard of hearing people achieve a high quality of life in the community, will be helping the FSA get its food hygiene messages out to people in the deaf community by producing an accessible British sign language (BSL) version of the ‘Kitchen confidential’ DVD. The charity will be showing this at a number of health information and healthy eating events as well as quiz nights for deaf people in the Glasgow Deaf Centre. The BSL version will also be uploaded onto the Deaf Connections website for wider circulation.

Deaf Connections is also in the process of refurbishing its community kitchen to deliver cookery, healthy eating and food hygiene courses for people in the deaf community and through funding from the FSA in Scotland, staff and volunteers will be able to access food hygiene training in advance of the community café opening. The funding will also allow them to purchase a hand hygiene training kit that will be used for food preparation demonstration events and healthy eating cookery classes. Fridge thermometers will also be distributed by Deaf Connections home care service-to-service users who will be given advice on their use. This will give staff an opportunity to advise on the 4Cs of food hygiene.

The SCMA is promoting the work of the FSA, and in particular Food Safety Week to its members (approx 4,500 in total) through its magazine and website. The article on Food Safety Week can be found at the link below. SCMA staff and elected members will also be taking the ‘Kitchen Confidential’ DVD along to childminding groups to highlight good food hygiene practices. The DVD will also be shown at their six network meetings across Scotland, where leaflets and children’s activities will be handed out to raise awareness of the FSA and food safety.