A food safety expert has warned viral cake swaps and cake picnics gaining popularity around Australia are rife with hygiene risks, after an investigation was launched into a Brisbane event.<\/p>\n
Held across the world, cake swap events require attendees to bake cakes which are then swapped and shared between hundreds of participants.<\/p>\n
A recent cake picnic run by Doughy Events, dubbed Let Them Eat Cake, was held in Brisbane on Saturday, January 17.<\/p>\n
Attendees were charged $35 to attend the event, advertised as Brisbane’s biggest cake swap, with 1,000 cakes expected.<\/p>\n
Attendees said the cakes were sitting out for several hours uncovered. (Supplied: Kayla Nemaia)<\/p>\n
One attendee, Kayla Nemaia, said participants were told to line up outside when dropping their cakes off at the venue.<\/p>\n
“I was really excited to go to the bake swap because I’d seen it done online in New York,” she said.<\/p>\n
“We waited for maybe 40 minutes in the line \u2014 it was hot, and people didn’t have their cakes covered, they were just out in the open.”<\/p>\n
Her sister dubbed her creation the ‘leaning tower’, as the cake’s cream icing had melted in the sun, Ms Nemaia said.<\/p>\n
She said the group had to wait another two hours between placing their cakes in a room \u2014 which she said was not air conditioned \u2014 and returning to sample other attendees’ baked goods.<\/p>\n
“Nobody should have eaten any of those cakes.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“I was looking around and there were heaps of cakes that were melted or droopy.”<\/p>\n
“I did take slices from the cakes that I knew the bakers, but I did not consume any of them.”<\/p>\n
Another participant, Samruddhi Phadke, said she believed the event was well-intentioned, but agreed there were contamination and health concerns.<\/p>\n
“They told us to have a full list of ingredients displayed next to the cakes, but a lot of the cakes didn’t have one,” she said.<\/p>\n
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Kayla Nemaia had concerns about the health and safety risks at the event. (Supplied: Kayla Nemaia\u00a0)<\/p>\n
“I don’t think the organisers had any staff capacity to check \u2026 because there were just so many people.”<\/p>\n
“I was very concerned for people with allergies and dietary requirements because there weren’t enough knives to cut the cakes, so people were using the same knife for different cakes.”<\/p>\n
Attendees were asked to agree to a waiver before the event, accepting food consumption and allergy risks, and releasing Doughy Events, organisers and volunteers from liability.<\/p>\n
Cake swap under investigation<\/p>\n
Brisbane City Council, which regulates Brisbane food businesses, has launched an investigation into the cake swap event.<\/p>\n
“All food businesses, including temporary stalls or market vendors, must meet Australia’s food safety standards,” a council spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
The ABC understands the council has received eight complaints about the cake swap from Queensland Health, and its investigation will examine if the event met food licensing regulations.<\/p>\n
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Attendees said not all of the cakes had a full list of ingredients next to them.\u00a0 (Supplied: Kayla Nemaia)<\/p>\n
‘Recipe for disaster’<\/p>\n
Food Safety Information Council CEO Lydia Buchtmann said cake swap events were a “recipe for disaster”, and posed a significant risk of spreading illness.<\/p>\n
“You don’t know when you’re eating that cake, how clean [the baker’s] kitchen was, do they have the cat running across the benchtop, do they have kids running around leaving germs everywhere?,” Ms Buchtmann said.<\/p>\n
“All these things can build up into a really nasty incident where you can get very, very sick.<\/p>\n
“Doing something amateur like this where it’s hot and you don’t know the hygiene of people who’ve made your cakes is such a risky thing to do.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ms Buchtmann said food-poisoning was a serious illness, and an outbreak could put extra strain on hospitals.<\/p>\n
“[Food poisoning] can be life-threatening for the elderly, for pregnant mums, for small children.”<\/p>\n
“There are people in there with serious disease and you don’t want people turning up just because there’s a really nasty case of food poisoning.”<\/p>\n
Cake picnics tour Australia<\/p>\n
Further cake swaps are scheduled in Sydney and Canberra next month, according to the Doughy Events Instagram.<\/p>\n
Ms Phadke said, despite the problems with the Brisbane event, she planned to attend another cake swap in the future.<\/p>\n
“It was a big undertaking for someone, for a small business owner, and they did well for what they had to work with,” Ms Phadke said.<\/p>\n
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Ms Phadke said the same knife had to be used for multiple cakes due to a lack of cutlery. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
“I don’t have issues with allergies and dietary requirements, and I think I have a pretty strong stomach.<\/p>\n
“I’m pretty confident that, hygiene-wise, I’ll be fine, and I just want to have that experience of people coming together and showcasing their art.”<\/p>\n
Ms Nemaia said attendees should know the risks before buying a ticket.<\/p>\n
“People that have allergies or anything like that, I would not recommend attending only because there’s really no safeguards for those types of people,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I think because you are paying to attend as a consumer, that there are checks and measures that should be in place, that were not in place at all.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Doughy Events has been contacted for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A food safety expert has warned viral cake swaps and cake picnics gaining popularity around Australia are rife…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":536034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4740,10934,112334,82619,237071,237074,19756,79509,5022,237072,50,237073,4797,4798,8152,237070,1062],"class_list":{"0":"post-536033","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-brisbane","10":"tag-brisbane-city-council","11":"tag-cake","12":"tag-doughy","13":"tag-doughy-events","14":"tag-food-poisoning","15":"tag-hygiene","16":"tag-investigation","17":"tag-let-them-eat-cake","18":"tag-news","19":"tag-picnic","20":"tag-qld","21":"tag-queensland","22":"tag-safety","23":"tag-swap","24":"tag-viral"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115942130400746372","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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