Ensuring food is safe and suitable for everyone
Each day, more than 5 million New Zealanders and around 40 million consumers around the world interact with our food system – from farm to fork.
Food safety is a key part of the wider New Zealand food story. Food and beverage exports make up 64% of total merchandise exports, reaching over 200 marketplaces around the world, and providing employment and prosperity for hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders.
New Zealand Food Safety ensures that the food that is grown, produced, prepared, shared, and consumed across Aotearoa is safe and suitable for everyone.
Thanks to New Zealand’s robust food safety system and global assurances, consumers here and overseas can rely on the safety, authenticity, and suitability of our food.
Watch a video about the work of New Zealand Food Safety (1:42) – YouTube
What New Zealand Food Safety does
- Food safety research: we provide a wide range of general science and risk assessment advice.
- Sets rules: we focus on setting the rules and guiding the implementation of standards for food production, processing, importing and exporting.
- Helps people meet the rules: we manage registrations and related approvals, support food exporters and do operational research.
- Checks the rules are being followed: we provide a range of food safety and biosecurity verification and certification services to support market access strategies and set standards.
- Enforces the rules: we protect public health, investigate breaches of food legislation, and use enforcement interventions.
- Provides assurances to overseas markets: we provide standards of assurance for New Zealand's food safety, live animal, plant, wine, and organic systems.
- Prepare for and respond to incidents: we plan for and respond to food safety incidents to protect public health, economic prosperity, and our food way of life.
Find out more about our work
The New Zealand Food Safety Strategy
Food safety and suitability research
Responding to food safety incidents [PDF, 4 MB]
Our imported food system
To protect public health and maintain trust and confidence in our food, New Zealand’s imported food system must be able to manage the risks of existing and emerging hazards. Our infographic has information on our current work as well as improvements we could make in the future.
A future-ready imported food system – infographic [PDF, 1.1 MB]
Subscribe to food safety newsletters
We produce several newsletters to provide regular updates on what’s happening in the food safety system:
- ACVM News and Views
- Food News: for councils, verifiers, food safety officers, and others
- Organics News: for organic product growers and producers
- Food Importer News: for food importers, agents and food businesses
- Wine News: for wine businesses about exporting wine under the Wine Act 2003
Subscribe to these newsletters and other food safety topics
