Exploring Food Hygiene Literacy in Small Business Food Catering in Indonesia: An Effort to Maximize Business Added Value

Customer trust is an important factor in the food catering company. In this instance, one of the most crucial elements that clients should have access to is food safety and hygiene guarantees. However, business actors face significant challenges due to a lack of awareness about food hygiene. This is a quantitative study designed to assess food hygiene literacy among business actors. The study included 59 small-scale food catering business actors. Using SPSS 23, the results of this study show that at the literacy category level, participants were most aware of functional literacy, followed by communicative literacy and critical literacy. These findings suggest that participants recognized the importance of health information on food packaging labels, which is frequently not communicated properly to the public. In this scenario, business players must ensure that the practice of providing health information on food packaging labels is clearly accessible to the public. Clear information may not only inform, but also educate the public on how to make healthy eating decisions. This study contains limits in terms of the food catering company actors included, which might have been expanded to include more business actors representing a broader range of business scales; nonetheless, this can be used to recommend further studies. Second, this study only focuses on three dimensions of literacy, which were adapted from prior studies, with the hope that expanding on other factors may enrich future studies.