For food-mad Singapore, Christmas, New Year and the upcoming Chinese New Year seasons offer more reasons to feast. But with a 73 per cent jump in food-poisoning cases last year, appetites could be dampened. According to the Ministry of Health, the increase could be attributed to a few food-poisoning incidents with a high number of people affected in the last quarter of 2018. Between November last year and March this year, mass gastroenteritis incidents were also reported. These ranged from the most serious case, in which a 38-year-old man died after eating a bento set from Spize, to a mass gastroenteritis outbreak where 13 PCF Sparkletots pre-schools and Plan Student Care Centres were hit with salmonella. Such cases not only cause misery, or worse, for unsuspecting consumers who trust food businesses to offer safe meals. They also tarnish the hard-earned reputation of eateries and caterers.

What is also worrying is that these food-poisoning cases are occurring at popular and reputable businesses such as Spize and Mandarin Orchard Hotel. So it was welcome news that the Singapore Food Agency has launched a tender to set up a food-safety experimentation laboratory. The laboratory will explore high-tech solutions to the challenge of ensuring food hygiene. The agency had already hinted recently that closed-circuit-television cameras could become mandatory in commercial kitchens as a way of tracking food-hygiene practices. The laboratory will be tasked with exploiting more sophisticated technology, including augmented and virtual reality, the Internet of Things and facial recognition, to track and flag food-handling and safety issues.