Hong Kong's Surveillance System Detected 5,300 External Food Incidents in 2025

The Centre for Food Safety of Hong Kong published in April 2026 its Food Incident Review Report for 2025, which recorded 5,300 incidents detected by the Food Incident Surveillance System (FISS) during the year, an identical figure to 2024. FISS is the mechanism through which the CFS monitors alerts, recalls, and food safety findings that occur outside Hong Kong that could affect the local market, since the city imports the vast majority of food it consumes. Microbiological and chemical hazards dominated the incidents detected during the year.

That the figure remains exactly stable year-over-year, in a system that actively monitors thousands of external sources, suggests that the volume of food incidents globally—at least those relevant to an importer market like Hong Kong—is neither growing nor decreasing significantly. For an economy that depends on imports for virtually all of its food supply, an external surveillance system like FISS serves a function that in other countries falls on border control and inspection of domestic raw materials.

For TAAG, a surveillance system focused on detecting before the product reaches port—rather than waiting for a finding to occur within its own territory—is the model that any highly importer economy needs to sustain, and confirms that the capacity for rapid microbiological analysis at the point of entry is as relevant as external information surveillance for a city that cannot rely solely on what other countries decide to report.