Be careful with 'country' food from China

(Baonghean) - Exchanging, trading, and buying and selling food online is a current trend. However, transactions on this type of 'market' do not have a binding mechanism and especially ensuring food safety and hygiene is very difficult to control.

Every day, instead of going to the traditional market, Ms. Thanh Lan in Hung Phuc ward (Vinh city) has the habit of shopping online. Sharing about this, she said that it is normal because office women do not have much time. Meanwhile, just by going on Facebook, using a few simple steps, she can buy enough food for family meals. Moreover, the buyer does not need to go to the place, does not have to bargain, the goods are carefully preserved and delivered to the hands immediately upon request.

Browsing through social networks, it's easy to come across statuses advertising homemade foods with "guaranteed quality, clear origin, fresh ingredients".

Subjectively, Ms. Lan said: Going to the market online, especially going to the food market, it is easy to find clean and quality products. Because online sellers are often non-professionals, the products they provide are often homemade products of their families and relatives, with clear origins.

In the past, online transactions were mainly consumer goods and fashion items such as clothes, shoes, etc. However, recently through the social network Facebook, online food markets have developed.

Looking through the sales addresses, it is easy to see that each address does not have many products for sale. However, sellers often take advantage of consumers' preference for clean, quality products, introducing them as country products, products produced by families themselves, or products from companies with VietGAP certification.

Finding out some reputable business addresses, this is reasonable, because these are establishments that already have business premises at specific addresses; Online transactions are just an information channel for them to connect with customers. Or in some cases, the goods are self-produced in small quantities, mainly to provide to brothers or close friends.

Besides, there are also many addresses selling "genuine" and "high-quality" goods but the origin is actually unclear. On the occasion of Tet, many websites sell dried fruits with attractive introductions that they are from Da Lat such as: Potatoes, melons, avocados, crispy peaches, chewy persimmons, chewy sweet potatoes... However, Ms. Mai Binh on Hermann Street (Vinh City), a person with experience in trading goods from Da Lat, said: Most of these products are from China. The products in Da Lat only have a few products such as jam, strawberry, passion fruit, sweet potato, persimmon, tamarind candy, mulberry candy, not as rich as on the current online market...

A shipment of fruit without legal documents was seized by the Environmental Police Department (PC49), Nghe An Provincial Police and Nghe An Market Management Department in Quynh Luu on December 12 - photo: Thao Nguyen.

The buyers themselves, when buying, only believe in the introduction and do not have an exact basis to distinguish what is real and what is fake. It is also necessary to see that, because of trusting the seller, even though they do not know clearly about the quality, women are still willing to pay a lot of money to buy clean food. Meanwhile, the brand and origin are very unclear.

Ms. Mai Anh has just given birth, so she is very fond of milk products originating from Russia. Believing the advertisement on the internet, she agreed to spend 570,000 VND to buy a box of Nan milk (800g) - hand-carried goods, 200,000 VND more expensive than domestic products. However, it was only recently that she realized she was "cheated" because the same imported product from Russia, with a clear importing company, was sold at supermarkets and agents for only over 300,000 VND.

A dealer on Dinh Cong Trang Street (Vinh City) also said: “Customers prefer to buy hand-carried goods online without knowing which are genuine and which are fake. In our store, many people still sell online, come to get the goods and then advertise them as hand-carried goods at prices many times higher.”

My Ha - Thanh Chung