AJMAN // Ajman rolled out the pilot phase of its food safety programme for more than 3,000 businesses on Sunday.
After two years of preparation, the first phase will be to train managers working in Ajman hotels, starting on Monday.
“Food processing goes through many steps,” said Humaid Al Mualla, director of public health and environment at Ajman Municipality. “From the initial industrial manufacturing up to consuming, probably one of the most important and vulnerable steps is the one which involves preparing food in restaurants and that’s why we need to focus on that.”
He said more training would raise the emirate’s level of food safety.
“Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah started before us, but it’s never too late,” he said. “We need to start because it’s very much needed here. We haven’t had a significant number of food poisoning cases, but we’re not waiting for any to happen. We need to avoid them before they occur.”
The programme will integrate training, examination, food safety management systems and certification, all linked with municipality inspections.
“This programme is built on a long-term strategy and we’re not expecting it to be accomplished in less than four years,” said Abdullah Al Tamimi, the municipality’s head of public health. “We’re building it as a training programme then have to refresh the trainer, and we are specifically choosing the most-ready establishments, like the hotels. Secondly, we will look at medium businesses like catering companies.”
More than 3,000 of the emirate’s businesses will be involved, eventually including school canteens, universities and hospitals.
“The first priority is public health,” said Dave Shannon, operations director at TSI Quality Services, the programme’s consultancy. “Ajman is growing quickly and we want the programme to support this from the hospitality and tourism point of view as it can help enhance the emirate’s reputation.”
For that, the programme will be linked to the Ajman Tourism Department.
“We need to get the content right,” he said. “But we can also put a programme to communicate what will be happening over the next few years and what the expectations are so the industry will know. Unless you know the plan, phases, structures, roles and responsibilities, it’s a lot less effective.”
All the lessons learnt from other emirates will feed into Ajman’s plan.
“The emirate has a great advantage because lessons will come in from day one to build a more effective programme,” Mr Shannon said. “The first phase is about good hygiene practices so that the whole industry will be as similar as possible, which makes inspections a lot easier.”
Dr Joanne Taylor, training and research director at TSI, said labour training would be based on visual material.
“Picture-based examination will be provided and successful candidates will receive certificates,” she said. “The municipality will then check their hygiene training system and provide them with certificates.”
She said the pilot phase was vital to gather data.
“It includes businesses who wish to be the first to participate in the programme, mainly hotels,” she said.
“Monday is the first day of training provided to managers, review visits will occur in the weeks after training.”
Ajman is also working with the Ministry of Environment and Water and the Food and Agriculture Organisation on a seven-year project called Promoting Food Safety in the UAE and Yemen.
“They did a rank for all municipalities and we ranked fourth,” Mr Al Tamimi said. “This will encourage us to work harder.”
cmalek@thenational.ae