The State Administration for Market Regulation ("SAMR") has recently drafted and issued the Administrative Measures for Sampling Food Safety Inspections (Revised Draft) (the "Revised Draft") for public consultation by March 4, 2019.
Compared with the previous version that encompasses 53 articles in seven chapters, the Revised Draft is now comprised of 70 articles in eight chapters, adding 21 new articles, consolidating and removing four articles and modifying 46 articles. Major rules of the Revised Draft are laid out in three aspects. First, sampling food safety inspections are classified into "supervisory sampling inspections" and "sampling inspections for risk monitoring and assessment purposes", depending on the purposes of and approaches for the monitoring work, and the definition of each category of sampling inspections is provided. Second, in response to emerging business forms, such as "online-sold food", relevant sampling requirements are added in accordance with work realities. Third, with a view to addressing the difficulty in raising an objection to an inspection result that indicates the failure to meet the standard and claiming a re-inspection, as frequently reflected by local market regulators, a targeted improvement is made to relevant rules, a move to safeguard the legal right of food producers and operators to raise an objection and claim a re-inspection and avoid the waste of administrative resources.