The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is gearing up to relaunch its campylobacter retail survey before the end of August, five months after suspending its previous testing method due to a change in neck trimming approach by processors.
The Agency’s chief executive, Catherine Brown, also told a recent FSA board meeting that it was “encouraging” the development of a new campylobacter proficiency testing scheme.
“This will involve sending samples to all participating testing laboratories to ensure that campylobacter is being detected uniformly and at the correct levels,” she said, adding that a webinar is planned for all interested stakeholders to learn about the proposals for the scheme.
FSA is also pursuing an “open data” approach to the issue, an approach which it says has already been the subject of “initial discussions” with industry.
“We are strongly encouraging the retail industry to move towards publishing their own campylobacter testing data, in line with robust standards that we are developing, with a view to then removing them from our retail survey,” she said.
“This will reduce the cost to the taxpayer of the FSA monitoring industry performance and also allow industry to speak directly to their customers about how seriously they are tackling contamination on their whole chicken.”
