Food surveillance

Surveillance plays a key role in generating the evidence base that Food Standards Scotland relies on to verify the safety and standards of food and animal feed sold in Scotland, and to identify risks to our supply chains.

We developed our surveillance strategy in 2016. This was based on a wider programme of work by the Food Standards Agency in Scotland (FSAS) to address recommendations made three years earlier by the Scottish Government’s expert advisory review of the lessons to be learned from the horsemeat incident.

We have defined our approach to food surveillance as:

The intelligence we gather through this process underpins our responsibilities in relation to risk assessment, policy development and the delivery of food law. This allows us to meet our public health and consumer protection obligations and to achieve our vision for a safe, healthy and sustainable food system that benefits and protects the health and well-being of everyone in Scotland. 

We take account of a wide range of sources of information to help us to identify risks and to make sure our activities are targeted to issues relevant to consumers and food businesses in Scotland. This includes our horizon scanning and food sampling programmes, both of which play a key role in generating the data and evidence needed to support our surveillance strategy.