Consumer’s Preference and Food Safety Awareness on Buying Chicken Meat in Sungai Petani, Malaysia.

Abstract

The issue of foodborne disease is increasing in Malaysia nowadays. Malaysia is a developing country and all Malaysians have the right to learn about food safety knowledges in primary school, secondary school, even in the university level. Therefore, Malaysians should be more aware about these knowledges and fully implement in their daily life, especially in the meat quality evaluation. However, the food contamination cases increased rapidly among local citizens. Particularly, in the city of Sungai Petani, a massive food poisoning incident happen before which is related to consumption of chicken meat in a wedding celebration. In total, 65 of wedding participants are admitted to hospital for treatment, while 3 people died from food poisoning. This situation is contributed by Salmonella sp. in chicken meats that served the wedding participants. From this incident, it motivates me to start a survey regarding food safety and behavior of purchasing chicken meats in this city.

Hence, I collected 126 samples from three locations in Sungai Petani, which are Taman Ria Jaya morning market, Taman Ria Jaya night market, Tesco (Utara) supermarket with Google form. Besides, online survey had been conducted by using WhatsApp. Before survey, respondents will be informed about purposes of this study, confidentiality of the data provided, topic concerned and approximate duration required for interview. All results obtained from survey are analyzed with IBM SPSS and Microsoft Excel. It can reflect an overall condition of food safety and hygiene knowledge among citizens and identify whether chicken stalls involved are willing to follow the management system from HACCP.

The results from SPSS analysis show that education of respondents in Sungai Petani City, Malaysia had significant relationship (P<0,05) with the knowledge on food safety and awareness, while the occupation of respondents had significant relationship (P<0,05) with the choices of chicken meat in their daily life. Majority of respondents (59,5%) preferred to buy instantly-killed chicken meat and approximately 63,5% of them considered price, halal, size of meat and safety factors while buying chicken meat. Most of the chicken meat consumers (73%) from survey look forward to have improvement and transformation of chicken stalls from wet markets and supermarkets to fulfil food safety requirements in future. Increase of knowledge and awareness of consumers and meat handlers should be taken into account in order to improve the food safety and promote public health.