Food production - hygiene
The maintenance of safe foodstuffs to the consumer from the many hundreds of retail, catering and manufacturing outlets within the borough is a vital ingredient.
The authority holds a register of all food traders and each one is individually inspected without prior warning, to ensure that the practices are hygienic and that adequate controls are in place to prevent contamination with either foreign bodies or harmful bacteria. These requirements cover all premises from home caterers to ice cream vans and food factories to workplace canteens and all retail outlets including pubs and clubs. If you would like to register your premises please download a food business registration form.
All food handlers are required to have some training in safe food handling, personal hygiene, bacterial growth and temperature control. Advice on legislation and on the need for specific provisions during refurbishment of either new or existing premises is always readily available.
Many publications are available to assist local businesses and residents with food safety issues.
Each year the division receives a number of complaints from the public about foods which are apparently contaminated and each of these are investigated, often with advice from the local authority where the food is produced, to try and make sure that repeated contamination does not take place in the future. In order to ascertain the quality of food sold in the borough, officers routinely submit hundreds of samples of food taken at random to the Public Health Laboratory Service for testing for contamination and where problems are found the causes are investigated and remedied.
If you want contact us about an unsatisfactory food product bought in Merthyr Tydfil or to advise us that a food premises was failing to maintain a satisfactory standard of hygiene please contact
In conjunction with our colleagues in Trading Standards, the division also deals with national food alerts ensuring dangerous food produced elsewhere is removed from sale in Merthyr Tydfil.