Residents and visitors can be confident standards of food hygiene in restaurants and catering businesses across Cornwall are high, according to the latest food safety enforcement report issued by the independent national Food Standards Agency (FSA). 

With Cornwall Council having responsibility for monitoring food safety at more than 8,652 food premises across Cornwall, 97% of premises are broadly compliant with food hygiene standards.

Food Safety Officers from Cornwall Council conduct programmed food hygiene inspections of all registered food premises and revisit to check that work has been carried out where necessary. This data is reported by the FSA annually.

In relation to food hygiene, in Cornwall:

• 2,582 premises were issued with informal written notices about food hygiene - 98% complied

• 27 premises were subject to formal enforcement actions with hygiene improvement notices issued

• Three businesses’ voluntarily closed, and three were formally closed by use of an emergency prohibition notice.

In relation to food standards, 255 premises were issued with a written warning.  Warnings were for a variety of reasons, including premises where food was wrongly described as ‘Cornish’ on menus.

This has led to the Council recently launching the ‘Product of Cornwall’ scheme, backed by Michelin-starred chef Paul Ainsworth, so Cornish suppliers can get Cornwall Trading Standards to vet the origin of their produce and consumers can know that they are buying genuine Cornish produce.

There were four prosecutions for food hygiene breaches and two prosecutions for food standard breaches which were concluded during the period of the report.