SMILEY
Check the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration’s assessment via The Danish Smiley scheme.dk
About the Smiley scheme
Since 2001, the Smiley scheme has made it easy for Danish consumers to determine which businesses that seems to have the food legislation best in hand.
For 12 years, the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration’s inspection reports have been made public, accompanied by a Smiley; and, the smile being more or less accommodating, the consumer can easily determine whether the report has been positive or negative. The scheme has thus contributed to create a higher degree of transparency which means that the businesses can make comparisons among themselves and step up competition with respect to food safety which will, eventually, be to the benefit of the consumers.
- Inspection reports must be externally available
- Inspection reports must be available on the individual company’s website
Facts about the Smiley scheme
From the webpage ‘Facts about Smiley’, you have access to 175,000 inspection reports covering both retail and wholesale businesses in Denmark.
The scheme is easily visible from the street
A 2008 analysis showed:
- The consumers’ knowledge about the Smiley scheme to be at 100% with 97% answering that the scheme is a good or a very good idea.
- 59% of consumers actually having encountered a poor Smiley at a restaurant answer that they refrained from eating there.
Increased compliance with regulations
The number of enterprises following the regulations, and hence being awarded a happy Smiley, increased from 70% in 2002 to 86% in 2010 – thus a 23% improvement.
At the end of 2012, the Elite Smiley had been awarded 53.5% of the enterprises eligible for this inspection epithet.
Source: The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration web pages
In case you have any questions or tasks to be solved, do not hesitate to contact us. We shall, of course, always be at your service.
