Maile leads food safety blitz targeting spaza shops and supermarkets in Soweto

JOHANNESBURG - Gauteng Finance and Economic Development MEC Lebogang Maile on Monday led a food safety blitz targeting spaza shops and supermarkets in Soweto.

The aim is to check if the stores are selling contaminated foods.

This comes after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s directive for store owners to register their businesses in an effort to regulate spaza shops.

Two supermarkets have so far been raided since Monday morning.

The first stop was at Shoprite in Dlamini, followed by a visit to Supa Store in Moroka.

Both stores were found with several violations of food safety regulations as they both had expired food and rodent waste on some products.

The MEC said that they had issued notices to the stores.

"With some of the findings, they don’t qualify for the closure but they are weaknesses that we have raised with them and they have agreed that they are going to attend to them. There are a few products that we found on the shelves that have expired and we have removed those."

Both stores remain open and will be visited again for further inspections.