Social selling comes of age – but is it safe?
Social media has transformed food sales, but how are authorities ensuring online sellers meet food safety standards? By Nick Hughes.
Type ‘food’ into the search bar of Facebook Marketplace and you’ll fine all manner of delicacies on offer: from homemade curries and samosas, to freshly made biltong or cones of colourful confectionery.
This direct model of buying and selling food has grown significantly in recent years, turbocharged by the Covid-19 pandemic which forced entrepreneurial types to find creative ways to generate an income during lockdowns.
Buying a curry from a neighbourhood cook may have an informal, community-spirited feel to it, yet in legal terms those selling food over social media platforms like Facebook, eBay and Instagram are considered food business operators in just the same way as the local takeaway selling food over the phone or via a delivery aggregator like Just Eat or Deliveroo.
In practice, that means the food business must be registered with a competent authority before they even begin trading. They must provide information on ingredients that cause allergies or intolerances either at the point of order or on delivery, and minimum hygiene requirements must be met including temperature control for perishable foods.
The extent to which this does or does not happen has been the subject of much debate within the enforcement community. Back in 2019, I wrote an article for The Grocer magazine titled ‘Is selling via social the next food safety scandal?’ As part of my research, I spoke with numerous food safety experts, including those working on the ground in communities to ensure food hygiene standards are being met, many of whom expressed concern that a cottage industry was emerging almost entirely below the radar of regulators.
Things have changed for the better since then and regulators are now far more attuned to the different models of selling food online and the relative risks involved. They are also looking to take proactive measures to ensure online sellers are brought safely within the regulatory sphere, including by engaging with the platforms through which many people now trade.
Growing trade
... although the concept of businesses selling food from a distance isn’t a new thing (takeaways, for example, have long taken customer orders over the phone) what has changed is the number of businesses operating fully online without a physical shop front. Gail Carroll, FSAI
Research published by the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) in September 2024 found that around seven in ten food businesses operating online in England (67%), Northern Ireland (69%) and Wales (67%) now use Facebook as a sales channel.
Businesses in Ireland are following the same trend. “We are seeing an increase in online sales for several years now using social media and through the aggregators,” explains Gail Carroll, director of regulatory affairs and compliance building at the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI).
The FSAI has published guidance on selling food online since 2017 to help sellers comply with relevant food law. Carroll explains that although the concept of businesses selling food from a distance isn’t a new thing (takeaways, for example, have long taken customer orders over the phone) what has changed is the number of businesses operating fully online without a physical shop front.
The online food ecosystem encompasses a range of different business models, from high street restaurant chains selling food made on-site via an aggregator like Just Eat or Deliveroo, to individuals preparing food in their own domestic kitchen and then listing it for sale on Facebook Marketplace.
A lot of these are genuine businesses who have registered with the relevant authorities, according to Carroll, however some are either unaware of or not meeting their legal responsibilities. In 2020, FSAI investigated 47 unregistered food businesses that it uncovered through monitoring of online sales including via social media channels. Some of these were producing food in private dwellings, including three unregistered businesses making sushi in what Carroll describes as “totally unsuitable” conditions.
“There are a lot of businesses – most I would say – who want to do the right thing, they want to engage fully,” she says. “But because of the lack of transparency, online sales also provide an opportunity for bad operators to hide and we intend to continue to take strong action when we find those.”
Lack of transparency
As Carroll alludes to, one of the concerns over online food sales – particularly where food is being sold via closed social media groups using platforms like WhatsApp – is this lack of transparency for consumers compared with the information available in a physical premises. “That's a challenge for food businesses, it's a challenge for consumers [and] it's a challenge for regulators,” she says.
The FSAI has been doing a lot of work over recent years to raise awareness among online operators of the need to register, including through engagement on social media and with local inspectors. It is also looking to develop communication channels with key stakeholders including the handful of large multinational businesses that facilitate the majority of the online food trade.
FSAI has just established a new eCommerce and Online Food Business Forum which aims to provide a platform for addressing regulatory opportunities and developments and to promote consistency and responsible practices.
The regulator also held an event in 2022 through its Food Safety Consultative Council on the implications of selling food online, which was attended by some of the leading food aggregators and delivery companies.
Another key piece in the enforcement puzzle is working with partners at a European level since many of the issues being experienced in Ireland are common across EU member states. “A lot of the food legislation was written before these kind of complex models [were developed], so while the food safety requirements for businesses operating online are more or less the same […..] the actual legislation is not always written in a way that reflects the [new] kind of models,” Carroll says.
Enforcement gap
Regulators in the UK have experienced similar challenges to their counterparts in Ireland in their ability to police online food sellers, not least due to a growing gap between new business registrations and enforcement capacity.
In its joint annual review of food standards for 2023, published alongside Food Standards Scotland in October 2024, the FSA reported there were 580,000 registered food businesses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland at the end of 2023/24, compared to 568,000 a year earlier. Some local authorities have reported difficulties in keeping up with the number of new food business registrations, with 39,000 businesses awaiting their first inspection as of September 2023.
The FSA has sought the help of the big online delivery aggregators to ensure that businesses selling through their platforms are meeting their legal obligations. The three market leaders, Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat, have signed up to an Aggregators Food Safety charter by which they will only accept registered food businesses onto their platforms and require a minimum Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS) rating in order to be listed (currently two out of five for Deliveroo and UberEats, and three out of five for JustEat).
All three now display FHRS ratings to customers visiting their online listings, and both Deliveroo and JustEat allow customers to filter restaurants by FHRS rating. They have also all committed to use their channels to share food safety information and guidance, and to work with restaurant partners to support customers with food hypersensitivities.
“We have high standards of food hygiene in the UK, but many businesses are not displaying their ratings online, missing the opportunity to show their customers how seriously they take food hygiene.” Jesse Williams, head of the FHRS for the FSA
The FSA’s ambition is for customers to have greater visibility of food standards wherever they order food remotely and, as such, has recently run a campaign to encourage businesses to display their food hygiene rating online.
Research released alongside the campaign in September 2024 showed that despite widespread use by online sellers of Facebook, Instagram and other websites with online ordering capabilities, only around one in 10 businesses were displaying a food hygiene rating online.
“We know that most consumers want businesses with an online food ordering service to display their food hygiene rating where it can clearly be seen before they order food,” says Jesse Williams, head of the FHRS for the FSA. “We have high standards of food hygiene in the UK, but many businesses are not displaying their ratings online, missing the opportunity to show their customers how seriously they take food hygiene.”
While the online delivery aggregators are leading the way in bridging the divide between regulator and operator, encouraging the big social media platforms to follow suit has to-date proved more challenging.
Speaking at a Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) conference in November 2023, Katie Pettifer, then the FSA’s director of strategy and regulatory compliance and now its interim chief executive, explained the difficulties for a single regulator trying to engage with the likes of Facebook over seller compliance:
“We are a tiny, tiny fish in a much bigger pond of consumer protection issues,” Pettifer said, adding, “we need to try and make common cause by joining up with other regulators in other sectors rather than just thinking about food”.
For EU member states such as Ireland, the new Digital Services Act (2022/2065) could provide the means to ensure that social platforms are acting as gatekeepers to safe food. The Act, which entered into full force on 17 February 2024, places legal obligations on the online platforms themselves to protect users from non-compliant products and services.
The new rules can only help regulators police a dynamic landscape in which new ways of selling food online will continue to disrupt traditional, linear supply chains.
“This is something we've been very aware of [and] working on for several years now,” says Carroll. “It's getting more complex [but] it’s a priority piece of work for the FSAI and for Irish inspectors. We're having good engagement with many of the people who are operating in this space with plans to do more work.”
