Food control officers perception of the challenges in implementing new food control requirements in Finland

In addition to the food control officers’ former tasks, new EU and Finnish legislations have established new obligations for them, such as building up a quality system, amending a control plan and expanding the collection of fees to cover all the control targets. In order to study the implementation of these new tasks, an electronic survey was sent to the local food control officials in Finland. Our study shows that there will be significant differences in implementing the new food control requirements in Finland by our local units when we take into consideration the time of implementation, the approach and content of control plans, and the quality systems or fees. Especially the risk-based estimation of the control objects seems to have created a challenge in both the quality systems and in the control plans; in only 16% of the municipalities, the risk estimations had been calculated for each control object and in most cases, this estimation was made and the control frequency was decided on solely by their own inspector of the object alone. Furthermore, the amount of the planned fees per hour varied from 21 Euros to 45 Euros. Several respondents also expressed that they had no knowledge of the grounds for the charges of future inspections or the amount of fees. What is apparent is that the new approach will be implemented relatively slowly in Finland and there is a risk of the different treatment of business operators depending on their geographical location.