A research on knowledge and practice levels about food safety and hygiene of employees in the production of the traditional Maraş ice-cream in the confectionery businesses of tourism services

The world tourism market is growing much more year by year and the tourists tend to prefer the rich touristic regions in terms of cultural values a higher level than before with this growth. Thus, it has been a significant increase in the number of tourist trips with curiosity to recognise and learn about different cultures in the results of the changes and developments in tourism sector in recent years. At the present time, it arises the importance of the traditional Maraş ice-cream that situated among traditional food resources of our country under the cultural tourism, given the situation of domestic and foreign tourists prefer low calorie, less processed and a lower proportion of additives food products including indigenous flavors for their nutritional needs. Maraş ice-cream has much probability to infection of pathogen bacteria in its production and storage process. It brings many health risks especially food poisoning when included in the production process of the ice-cream of the employees do not have enough information for the purposes of food safety and hygiene in terms of both tourists and public health. It constitutes the purpose of this study revealing knowledge and practice levels about food safety and hygiene of employees in the production department of the traditional Maraş ice cream in the confectionery businesses of tourism services in the City of Kahramanmaraş. The questionnaire created for the purpose was used for the 213 production employees from 7 different confectionery businesses based on convenience sampling. When conducting the survey, a face-to-face survey method was used. The data that was obtained from the survey, was analyzed using SPSS 21.0 statistical package software. In this scope, frequency analysis together with mean and standard deviation cofficients were also shown. At the same time, "Mann-Whitney U" and "Kruskal-Wallis H" tests were applied on the data considering the situation in which the data are not normally distributed in order to determine demographic characteristics of the production employees whether there is any effect on knowledge and practice levels about food safety and hygiene of the production employees. As a result of the research, knowledge and practice levels about food safety and hygiene of the production employees was "high" level. The results also showed that the age, education level, working experience and training status on food safety and hygiene of the production employees has a significant effect on knowledge level about food safety and hygiene of the production employees. On the other hand, the gender of the production employees has not a significant effect on knowledge and practice levels of food safety and hygiene. Finally, several recommendations were presented to the confectionery businesses and researchers in this area of work in the light of the findings.