Abstract
Eating food is one of the most important needs of every person, so their safety and quality should be crucial for everyone. People expect, that food they eat is hygienically and health safe. Unfortunately, people usually start to focus on food safety only when various food scandals are exposed and it is too late. Mass consumption of food is the cause of a high risk to human health, but only in the case of harmful food. Food-borne diseases are a common and widespread phenomenon in all parts of the world, regardless of the economic development of the country. Protection of human, animal and plant health is one of the main economic priorities of each country. The political objective of the European Union is therefore to ensure that European Union citizens have access to safe and nutritious foods, so it must meet strict safety standards. In ensuring food safety, it is necessary to take into account all aspects of the food production chain as a whole, because each subject can have a potential impact on food safety. This paper deals with the issues of food safety and food quality. The main objective was to find out how consumers perceive higher quality food and whether they read information included on the food packaging. Primary data were obtained from a survey that was conducted on the sample of 478 respondents living in Slovakia. For a deeper analysis, several assumptions, which were verified by Friedman Test, Chi-Square Test of Independence, Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test, were formulated. The survey has found out that 84% of respondents buy higher quality food and 60% purchase them because of health-related reasons. More than half of respondents search for the information about food safety on the Internet and the same percentage considere government as the most reliable source of information about food safety. Unfortunately, just more than one quarter of them read the information on food label and for 34% is this information unsufficient.
Highlights
Food safety is undoubtedly one of the major global concerns that human beings have to confront and are continuously fighting for (Lv et al, 2018)
The main objective was to find out how consumers perceive higher quality food and whether they read information included on the food packaging
The main aim of the present paper is to examine consumersawareness of food safety and the relationship between consumers and food quality
Summary
Food safety is undoubtedly one of the major global concerns that human beings have to confront and are continuously fighting for (Lv et al, 2018). The world will need to feed around 9 billion people by the year 2050 and to do so through safe sustainable food chains (Godfrai et al, 2010). Nowadays billions of people in the world are at risk of unsafe food. Many millions become sick while hundreds of thousands die every year because they consume unsafe food. Most of the population will surely get over soon, but these groups can have a long-term effect which can be serious in some cases and lead to a final death of the consumer, especially with certain bacteria infections (U.S Department of Health & Human Services, 2018). Based on the Regulation no.178/2002 of the European Parliament and of Volume 13
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