Bangladesh requires street food stalls to register with food safety authority

Food stalls on the streets and lanes of Dhaka and the rest of Bangladesh were required to register with the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority under regulations published in the official gazette on 16 July 2026. The Safe Food (Registration and Licence) Regulations, 2026, drawn up by the authority under the Safe Food Act 2013, cover everyone from footpath stalls and small restaurants to food importers and processors, BBC Bangla reported on 29 July.

Every person or business that produces, imports, processes, stores, supplies or sells food or food ingredients, or intends to, must register so that their names and addresses are on record. Small and medium food businesses need registration; those handling special or important food products also need a licence. Registration is valid for three years and can be renewed.

• No food business may operate without a licence.
• Producing, processing, storing or importing food requires a separate production or import licence for each product.
• Marketing a product under a brand name and packaging requires registration of each brand and package.

The Bangladesh Food Safety Authority was set up in February 2015 under the Safe Food Act 2013. A statutory body under the Ministry of Food, it regulates and monitors the production, import, processing, storage, distribution and sale of food and coordinates the agencies working on food safety. Its chairman, Md Shafiqul Islam, told BBC Bangla: "This is a very positive step. We may not be able to change everything in a day. But gradually street food shops too will come under supervision through licensing." He said the authority would try to keep the process simple, with online applications.

No reliable count exists of the temporary and mobile food stalls along Bangladesh's roads. The latest Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics figures put food-serving establishments at about 450,000, including hotels, restaurants and tea stalls, with about 67,000 fast food shops. In Dhaka and other big cities many people rely on these stalls for breakfast or lunch.

A study funded by the Food Safety Authority and led by Dr Latiful Bari of the University of Dhaka, published in June 2024, found bacteria in every one of 450 samples collected from vendors in the Dhaka North and South city corporation areas. According to The Daily Star, chotpoti, chola-muri, sandwiches, sugarcane juice, aloe vera juice and mixed salad carried excessive levels of E. coli, Salmonella and Vibrio; a plate of chotpoti held on average 72 million E. coli. The researchers traced the contamination to polluted water, dirty towels, unwashed hands and dust.

The same study, as reported by the Dhaka Tribune, found that out of every 10,000 consumers two fell ill from E. coli, four from Salmonella and one from Vibrio; why most people did not fall ill despite such contamination remained unknown. Worldwide, the World Health Organization estimates that about 866 million people, almost one in nine, fall ill each year after eating contaminated food, and 1.52 million die.

Dr Latiful Bari, chief scientist of the Food and Research Laboratory at the University of Dhaka, called the move reasonable but doubted it could be enforced. "With these rules they have come within a framework. Although the government does not have the capacity to verify whether their food is safe," he told BBC Bangla, adding that the government's laboratory and staff capacity was still very low.

Liton Sheikh, who sells tea and biscuits in Ramna, and Abdur Rahim, who runs a mobile stall nearby, told BBC Bangla they had not heard of the new registration rules. Imran Hasan, general secretary of the Bangladesh Restaurant Owners' Association, said the regulations were framed one-sidedly and would only expand a trade in licences: "The authority's power has increased here. But there is no direction as to how it will be implemented. Food safety is a vast chain. There is no vision in this about which step will be secured and how."

Photo: Faizul Latif Chowdhury / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources: BBC Bangla, The Daily Star, Dhaka Tribune, World Health Organization (WHO), Wikipedia (Bangladesh Food Safety Authority)