DM launches smart food safety services

Jamil Khan, Senior Reporter

Dubai Municipality’s vision to develop a happier and sustainable city has taken a step forward with the introduction of the latest smart services under the Foodwatch platform, aimed at enhancing food safety and customer experience. Khalid Mohammed Sharif Al Awadhi CEO of Dubai Municipality for Health, Safety and Environment Sector, launched two smart services under the Foodwatch banner, namely “Foodwatch Smart Permits” and “Foodwatch Confidence,” during a forum which marks a new beginning in the history of food safety management systems and associated services at the regional and international levels.

The Foodwatch platform, which is an innovative revolution, strives to take new leaps towards advancing food safety culture with the help of fully digitalized and algorithm-driven authentication gateway that allows regulatory authorities, food establishments, service providers and consumers to use many features aimed at promoting public health and making effective use of the available resources.

“Foodwatch is a unique platform that is driven by the use of big data to raise human performance in food safety and harmonize the food safety system in Dubai, and these data will be a model for setting up Block Chain for food safety at the local, regional and international levels,” said Al Awadhi.

Dubai Municipality has launched an intensive training program on 17th April 2019 for health supervisors working in food establishments registered with the Municipality. The first phase of this training program aims at holding 60 interactive sessions to train 1,600 food establishments and more than 2,500 health supervisors before the end of May 2019. To date, more than 500 supervisors have been trained and during these training sessions the challenges of managing records related to the day-to-day operations of food safety management were discussed. More than 90% of these records are in paper and the Municipality, through the Foodwatch platform, aims at eliminating the use of paper records, which will contribute to the Emirate’s vision of establishing a paperless government by the end of 2021.

Another innovative service launched on the Foodwatch platform is the Foodwatch Self-Inspection application also known as Foodwatch Confidence. It is a digital inspection tool that helps food establishments to manage daily food safety checks for their different operations.