Food safety handling knowledge and practices of Universiti sultan Zainal Abidin cafeteria food handlers

Food safety has become a huge concern among health authorities in Malaysia due to the
serious impact of foods being mishandled during preparation, processing, or storage,
especially in food service environments. Therefore, this study was conducted to study
knowledge and practices of safe food handling among Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin
(UniSZA) cafeteria food handlers. In this study, the questionnaires were modified from
the previous study and distributed to fifty-five respondents who were selected using a
convenience sampling method. The result was analysed and computed by using IBM
SPSS version 21.0. This study found the average mean scores for all twenty items of
knowledge towards safe food handling among food handlers involved in this study was
17.89±2.96. This indicates the majority of 87.3% (n = 48) respondents had ‘good’
knowledge while 7.3% (n = 4) respondents had ‘fair’ knowledge and another 5.5% (n = 3)
had ‘poor’ knowledge score towards safe food handling. Besides, the majority of
respondents had ‘good’ practices while none of the respondents had ‘poor’ and ‘fair’ score
levels towards practices of safe food handling. The average mean score of practices
toward safe food handling among food handlers involved in this study was 25.16±1.32.
The results showed a positive correlation between the safe food handling knowledge and
practices of UniSZA cafeteria’s food handler (p-value = 0.013). In conclusion, according
to the score levels of safe food handling knowledge among food handlers of UniSZA
cafeteria, the result revealed that the majority of the food handlers had a good level of
knowledge and practices towards safe food handling. Good knowledge and the right
practice among food handlers in their working premises would help to ensure that more
harm to food can be avoided.