Find out who to contact when you want to make a complaint about food and when something may pose a public health threat.
No matter how good a food manufacturer or supplier is, sometimes things go wrong and the customer is not happy with the food.
The manufacturer or supplier will often acknowledge it and issue an allergy alert or food hazard warning.
If you want to make a complaint about food you should phone the manufacturer, supplier or shop.
A prompt complaint to the retailer or manufacturer means they can recall the product and deal with your complaint quickly.
Contact the manufacturer if:
Make sure you:
keep receipts
keep the food in the wrapper and container
take digital images and email them to ehl.food@brighton-hove.gov.uk
keep perishable food in a fridge, especially if your complaint involves rotten food or food that smells or tastes off
follow the guidelines for best before dates, use by dates and instructions for use
contact the Environmental Health Service if you’re unhappy with the response from the manufacturer and you believe your complaint poses a public health risk
Do not:
handle or pull out any 'foreign' object found in the food
put the food where further deterioration could take place, put it in the fridge away from other foods
throw away any of the food
The Environmental Health Service deals with food complaints that pose a public health threat. It does not get involved in compensation claims.
Compensation claims are a civil matter that you must take up with the manufacturer and courts.
Environmental Health will deal with:
The time it takes to investigate food complaints varies. We often have to contact the manufacturer to give them an opportunity to tell us what happened.
We often ask the manufacturer’s local Environmental Health Officer to give us information about them.
We may ask a representative from the manufacturer to visit our offices. If the problem was because of poor temperature control, storage or handling in a Brighton & Hove premises, we’ll visit them.
This can take a while but as soon as we receive the article we will start the investigation within 24 hours.
We’ll update you on the progress at least once every 28 days. At the end of the investigation we’ll tell you the outcome in writing.
If you need any information about your complaint, please contact the Environmental Health team.
The Environmental Health service will take formal action when:
Find out more about our Environmental Health Enforcement Policy.
If we take formal action we’ll ask you to make a statement and to give evidence in court.
If we do not take formal action, we’ll write to you to explain this. We’ll ask if you want the company to have your details so they can contact you directly.
You can phone the Food Safety team and choose option 2.
Read our food safety complaint or query privacy notice for information on how we collect, store and process your data.
Trading Standards also deals with food complaints.
The type of complaints they deal with are:
Find out more about Trading Standards.
If a business is trading when it should be closed under the current restrictions, you can send an email to trading.standards@brighton-hove.gov.uk to report it to Trading Standards.