Taizhou city – located in East China's Jiangsu province – is rolling out an intelligent supervision platform for its food production sector, which is expected to greatly improve quality control, with ready-made meal producers the first to be served under the new system.
Officials predicted there would be a marked improvement in the overall supervision of food processing.
"The platform will supervise the entire process of enterprise procurement, production process control and factory sales, thereby preventing and controlling food safety risks," said Zhou Jinqi, from the Taizhou market regulation bureau.
In September, the bureau deployed a traceability and coding network for food producers and listed premade dishes as the first category to be coded under the new regime.
By the end of October, all ready-made dish manufacturers in Taizhou are projected to be included on the platform.
Consumers will be able to scan the traceability code on the packaging through their mobile phones to instantly know about the manufacturer, batch information and sampling status of the product.
The premade dish is an important category in the city's food industry and Taizhou is now home to over 100 ready-made food manufacturers, contributing to combined annual sales of 9.13 billion yuan ($1.25 billion).
The city's market regulation bureau has also issued its Risk Prevention and Control Guidelines for Premade Dish Production and provided training for all local food manufacturers involved in the field.