The first Better Training for Safer Food workshop for 2010 on food hygiene and controls of milk and dairy products takes place in Brescia, Italy on 19-23 April. Around 20 people are to attend, mainly from EU Member States and candidate countries. Most will be national authority staff involved in inspection and control of establishments producing milk and dairy products.

The training should raise participants' levels of expertise on food safety issues at all stages of production, processing and distribution. This will help to ensure high standards of hygiene during food production and proper controls throughout the food chain.

The training includes presentations on EU legislation and its implementing measures. Particular attention is paid to the Hygiene Package as well other, sector-specific legislation and its application. In-depth explanations of the organisation of official controls are also given.

The workshop has a strong practical emphasis and field visits take place to establishments involved in primary production and transformation. During the visits, participants use checklists to assess hygiene conditions. The visits are followed by debriefing and discussion sessions on control requirements.

Information on the training should be spread as widely as possible after the workshop, in accordance with the train-the-trainers principle. To this end, participants should preferably be in a position to disseminate their acquired knowledge to other national authority staff and private sector operators.

This programme comprises three different modules. Aside from milk and dairy products, the others cover meat and meat products and fishery products and live bivalve molluscs. Eleven workshops on each subject run in 2010-11.