A food vendor at the 2011 Lincoln Christmas Market has been ordered to pay £2,215 after admitting breaching hygiene regulations.
 |
| [relatedPosts title=”Related Posts”] |
|
|
Peter Bowser of Langworth, Lincoln, admitted to not having adequate and available hand washing facilities at his hog roast stall, which was based in the Lawn site on Sunday 4 December last year.
Employees at the Bowser Brothers Hog Roast stall were involved in handling and preparing large joints of raw meat, placing them into gas fired ovens and slicing the cooked meat and putting it into bread rolls for customers.
But a lunchtime inspection by the City of Lincoln Council’s Food Health and Safety Manager, Sara Boothright, found there were no appropriate hand washing or drying facilities available.
A portable unit provided for hand drying was empty and the only other facility provided for hand washing was a bucket of warm, dirty water with cloths in it, which had been witnessed being used by a food handler loading the raw meat into the gas ovens. At no time during the inspection did any of the staff serving the cooked food wash their hands.
A sample of the water was taken from the bucket and sent to the laboratory for examination and the water was found to have in excess of 12 million bacteria in it, this was 40,000 times above the maximum level acceptable for water used for hand washing.
Mrs Boothright said: “It is of some concern that Mr Bowser had an apparent lack of understanding as to the importance of having good hand wash facilities that were appropriate and available for use at all times irrespective of the environmental conditions.
“The trivialisation of the lack of available hand wash facility and hand drying facilities is, in my view, a demonstration of the paying lip service to an extremely critical food safety requirement.
“The importance on ensuring hygienic hand washing and hand drying in this type of high risk food operation can not be overstated. Mr Bowser’s failure to comply with this basic, yet food safety essential was a serious failure with the potential of putting public safety at risk.
“Raw meat can contain bacteria that will cause illness and in the worse case scenario death, such as, salmonella, E.coli and campylobacter. It should have been an imperative to ensure that public health is protected that a food business operator, carries out his food business in a manner that any potential risk to health is reduced to an acceptable level.”
In mitigation Mr Bowser claimed the water in the portable hand wash unit would not stay warm enough due to the cold weather and they had just run out of hand towels for drying hands.
Mr Bowser pleaded guilty at Lincoln Magistrates court to one count of not providing adequate hand washing facilities at his stall and was ordered to pay a fine and costs totalling £2,215
