December 19, 2012
South Burnett Regional Council will introduce a new food licence in 2013 for home-based businesses who sell food at markets, but it will leave not-for-profit community groups free to operate as they currently do.
The decision to introduce a new food business licence was flagged at last month’s council meeting.
Council officers said a food van operator at a local market had complained he was required to undergo food safety checks and pay annual licence fees to council in order to operate but amateur food sellers at markets did not.
The officers said because the public could get food poisoning from an unlicensed food seller, council had a duty of care to look at the matter.
Councillors agreed but expressed reservations about some aspects of the initial idea – particularly the effect it might have on community groups, service clubs, school fetes and the like – and decided to lay the proposal on the table until they’d had more opportunity to get community input.
Today, the Council was told that consultations with food operators at local markets had found most were agreeable to the idea of the new licence, which would have an initial assessment fee of $72 and an annual licence fee of $57.
Cr Cheryl Dalton said the dividing line council would use would be whether or not a food business was run for the operator’s personal profit.
She said if this were used as the criteria, then not-for-profit community groups running fund-raising sausage sizzles or mums whipping up a few cakes for the local school fete wouldn’t be affected and could continue operating as they currently do.
In addition, she said, some small home-based food businesses would probably be able to save money on licensing under the new scheme.
At the moment some of these businesses weren’t really big enough to merit a full food operator’s licence but had to have one because this was the only option council currently offered.
- Related Article: New Food Licence For Markets?
