JTC x FDAWU Micro-seminar

Food Safety and Workplace Compliance: Key Insights from JTC X FDAWU Micro-Seminar 2025

Singapore, 28th July 2025 — Singapore’s food industry is at a critical juncture, navigating rising costs, regulatory changes, and manpower challenges while ensuring compliance. The jointly organized JTC X FDAWU Micro-Seminar for Food Business Operators (28 July 2025) provided a roadmap for resilience, uniting regulators, industry leaders, and unions to address these.

Mr. Sankaradass s/o S Chami, General Secretary of the Food Drinks and Allied Workers Union (FDAWU), underscored the sector’s importance: “We recognize the challenges facing the food industry—rising costs, regulatory changes, and manpower pressures. FDAWU is committed to working with all stakeholders through these challenges, as we believe the food sector remains essential to Singapore’s economy.”

Likewise, JTC is committed to supporting tenants at Bedok Food City, Gourmet East Kitchen, and Shimei East Kitchen by sharing industry insights relevant to their daily operations.

Teo Tsu-Lyn, Acting Director for Industrial Estates (East) Cluster, said: “JTC is privileged to partner with FDAWU on this event and are heartened by the positive response to topics like food safety, technology adoption, and innovation. We look forward to organizing more sessions that foster learning and collaboration among our food industry community.”

This sentiment framed the seminar’s discussions, emphasizing collaboration between businesses, unions, and agencies like SFA, MOM, WSHC and NTUC.

As Singapore’s food industry prepares for upcoming regulatory updates and evolving workplace safety standards, operators face the dual challenge of maintaining compliance while optimizing productivity. Attendees gained insights from SFA, MOM, WSH Council, and Sengkang General Hospital, ensuring a holistic approach to operational resilience and highlighted how businesses can leverage NTUC’s CTC grants to fund automation, upskilling, and advanced safety solutions.

1. Regulatory Compliance and Best Practices

The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) emphasized Food Safety by Design, sharing lessons from past incidents to prevent contamination. Ministry of Manpower (MOM) provided an overview of initiatives implemented to enhance workplace safety and health (WSH), current WSH landscape, primary safety concerns and violations in the food manufacturing sector, along with learning points from accident cases. WSH Council subsequently provided information on resources like WSH training slides, videos, posters, pictograms and GIFs, which food business operators can tap on to enhance their WSH.

2. Funding and Technology Adoption

NTUC’s Industry Training & Transformation team detailed how CTC grants can support food businesses in adopting AI-powered surveillance, exoskeletons, and automation.

Case studies demonstrated how these investments reduce injuries and boost efficiency.

3. Future-Ready Workforce Strategies

The team from Sengkang General Hospital’s Occupational Medicine Service highlighted the business case for retaining mature workers, critical for an industry reliant on older workers. Health surveillance, job matching and re-design, ergonomic interventions and the use of assistive technologies were discussed through the use of real-world case examples. These simple yet effective measures were showcased as important strategies to enable older employees to work more productively yet face a lower risk of injury. The message was clear: A workplace tailored to the needs of an ageing workforce is a smarter and more sustainable one.

Innovations on Display

Attendees explored cutting-edge solutions such as ArmasTec’s fabric exoskeletons (reducing physical strain) and Ailytics’ AI surveillance systems (enhancing real-time compliance monitoring).

Who Benefits from Such Events?

This seminar was ideal for food manufacturers, catering services, and central kitchens operators seeking to navigate regulatory changes, improve safety, or secure funding for tech upgrades. Future editions will continue bridging gaps between policy, innovation, and on-ground implementation.

Missed the event? Follow FDAWU for updates on upcoming workshops or explore NTUC’s CTC grant portal to jumpstart your safety and automation journey.

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