Taiwan News
Date: 2016-08-29
By: Sophia Yang, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

A three-day food safety summit will kick off on Tuesday in Taipei and will be attended by food safety

I-Mei Foods Co. CEO Luis Ko (right) is explaining to the officials how the lab works.

experts from Taiwan and around the world. Before the summit, European Food Safety Authority Executive Director Bernhard Url and FoodWatch’s Campaign Director Matthias Wolfschmidt visited I-Mei’s Nankang Plant Monday to see what the so-called “Taiwan’s role model in food safety” has been doing to survive the food safety scandals which hit other companies in the country over the past few years and how they have eased consumers’ peace of mind.

Accompanied by the Taipei-based European Economic and Trade Office Deputy Head of Office, Viktoria Lovenberg, Bernhard Url and Matthias Wolfschmidt visited I-Mei Foods Co. ahead of the summit and were received by the company’s CEO Luis Ko. The team visited I-Mei’s Food Safety Lab and had a wide-ranging discussion and exchange of views ranging from food safety laboratory management, practice, to opportunities for lab collaboration.

I-Mei Foods managed to survive the food safety scandals thanks to its ownership of a food testing laboratory. As a result, the government in 2014 added a so-called “I-Mei clause” to the Act Governing Food Sanitation, demanding that about 70 food companies set up labs of their own in order to take more responsibility in preventing problematic food products from reaching the consumer.     [FULL  STORY]