Helsinki Environmental Health Chief: Quality stickers for grocery stores would be "unbelievably bad idea"

Finnish Food Safety Authority EVIRA would like to penalish stores selling sub-standard food items with "frowny face" warning stickers

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City of Helsinki Chief of Environmental Health Antti Pönkä dismisses the Finnish Food Safety Authority EVIRA’s suggestion of displaying quality stickers on doors of Finnish grocery stores in the same fashion as is done in Denmark.
      EVIRA Director General Jaana Husu-Kallio suggested in an interview with the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE that stores that attend to the quality of the food they sell should be rewarded with a smiley face sticker. Stores offering inferior quality products, on the other hand, would get a "frowny face" tag displayed in a visible place by the door.
      Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Sirkka-Liisa Anttila (Centre Party) told the Finnish news agency STT that in principle she supports the idea.
      In EVIRA Senior Officer Anne Fagerlund’s opinion the sticker would be a good way of making the quality monitoring results known to the public while adhering to the EU principle of transparency.
     
In Pönkä’s view, however, the quality sticker is an unbelievably bad idea. “Labelling would be immensely unfair and arbitrary”, Pönkä says.
      “It would be like throwing a dice. A sporadic inspection cannot reveal the truth about the quality of a store.”
      “The City of Helsinki will not be getting onboard with this one”, Pönkä declares.
      Also according to the Finnish Grocery Trade Association the use of the smiley face stickers should be taken under consideration only after the municipal foodstuffs monitoring practices have been unified and made first-rate. This way the retailers’ legal protection could be guaranteed across the entire country.
     
EVIRA admits that the use of the stickers could be an extreme measure. Hence the foodstuffs monitoring would have to have enough resources to replace an appointed frowny face label with a smiley face if the situation changes.
      A storekeeper would have to have a chance to demonstrate that the situation has been rectified, in which case the caused detriment to trade would not be unreasonable.
      In Helsinki most health inspections are performed at establishments producing food supplies and at various types of restaurants. The grocery store inspections concentrate on stores that for example deal with fresh meat and fish.
     
At the moment grocery stores’ quality control is based on self-monitoring. Inspectors will intervene if there are deficiencies in the self-monitoring practices or if an inspector notices something to complain about.
      If the deficiency noted is not rectified, a conditional imposition of a fine can take place. In Helsinki this does not happen often, as the Finns are conscientious and the level of hygiene is excellent, Pönkä explains.
      “On the other hand, nowhere else is the relevant legislation as incoherent as in Finland, where the entrepreneur in question has to be heard before the conditional imposition of a fine”, Pönkä adds. “Almost without exception everybody denies any wrongdoing.”
     
The discussion over the quality or otherwise of fresh produce in Finnish stores began when someone wrote in to the Letters column of Helsingin Sanomat last Friday with a report of depressing experiences at the fresh goods counters of a large supermarket chain.


Links:
  Finnish Food Safety Authority EVIRA

Helsingin Sanomat