This report acts as a public record of incident levels for reference purposes. It presents numbers and types of incident notifications to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) during 2014 that had the potential to impact on the safety of food or feed.
Incidents are defined broadly, and differ widely in types, causes, severity and the route of reporting. The report includes breakdowns of the number of reported food and feed incidents by incident categories, notifier, country of origin, and food commodity type.
The FSA will investigate incidents to determine whether there are any food safety implications.
Where appropriate, it will then take action to safeguard the public. The FSA’s Incident Database records the official audit trail of the investigations. It is the main source of the figures in the report.
The FSA also arranges the issue of food alerts to local authorities, other government departments, trade organisations, and Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) notifications to the European Commission. Furthermore, as part of its incident prevention strategy, the FSA monitors food and feed safety patterns in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and promotes awareness, good practice and information sharing.
Executive summary
In 2014, the Food Standards Agency was notified of and investigated 1,645 food, feed and environmental contamination incidents in the UK. The overall number of incidents was similar to those seen in recent years. However, in most categories, the numbers of incidents differ considerably from year to year.
The four largest contributors to the total number of recorded incidents in 2014 were:
• microbiological contamination (24%)
• veterinary medicines (13%)
• environmental contamination (12%)
• natural chemical contamination (9%)
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