The State Administration for Market Regulation has fully launched the online Food Safety Compliance and Quality Improvement Initiative to jointly safeguard the "taste safety" online.

On the 31st, the State Administration for Market Regulation convened representatives from e-commerce companies, associations and learned societies, regulatory authorities, news media, consumers, and other stakeholders in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province to launch a series of actions aimed at improving and enhancing compliance for online food safety.

The event, themed “e-Food, No Worries—Safety Online,” focuses on prominent problems in the online food sector. Through activities including policy briefings, the release of compliance guidelines, organizing expert reviews, facilitating exchanges of experiences with platform companies, and jointly signing the “Self-Regulatory Convention for Food Safety Management by Operators of Online Food Trading Platforms,” it will further send a signal of “strict regulation and strong compliance,” and continuously foster a co-governance atmosphere involving government oversight, industry coordination, corporate self-discipline, and social supervision.

Relevant officials with the State Administration for Market Regulation said that, to ensure that the series of actions for improving and enhancing compliance for online food safety produces practical results and remains effective over the long term, a collaborative co-governance mechanism will be established in which regulatory authorities, platform companies, associations and learned societies, technical institutions, and others all participate. The focus will be on building a new development pattern for the high-quality growth of the platform economy—one in which platforms are governed through networks and intelligent governance.

By striving to carry out the series of actions over the course of one year, the goals are to make the qualifications of online food business operators more transparent, business practices more standardized, regulatory effectiveness more evident, and the consumer environment more reassuring—so as to comprehensively improve the ability and level of online food safety governance and effectively safeguard the “safety on people’s tongues.”

The series of actions to improve and enhance compliance for online food safety will take as its starting point three major prominent issues to be addressed in priority—such as disorderly practices in livestream shopping, failure to verify the qualifications of entities that go online, and the rampant spread of false advertising. Through three aspects of measures—cracking down on illegal and non-compliant conduct by online food operators with full force, strictly regulating platform companies’ food safety management practices, and continuously promoting platform companies to enhance their food safety management levels—it will do its utmost to safeguard the “safety on people’s tongues,” and foster a safe, reassuring, and convenient online food consumption environment. (Xinhua News Agency)