Street Food: Hygiene Practices and Knowledge Among Food Hawkers Towards Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

Street food has become an important element of people's diets since it is easily accessible and affordable in urban areas, and it is woven into our modern lifestyle. However, many street food hawkers do not possess formal education and often lack basic knowledge and practices regarding food safety. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the hawkers' hygiene knowledge and review the hawkers' hygiene practices in relation to customer satisfaction. Content analysis is used on 32 journals published from the past five years worldwide to review how hawkers’ hygiene knowledge and hawkers’ hygiene practices have affected customer satisfaction. As a result, it was discovered that most of the hawkers did not attend food safety training and did not have a high level of food hygiene and safety knowledge. Furthermore, it was found that most of the hawkers did not practice proper personal hygiene, especially in handwashing washing practices. The findings also indicated that customer satisfaction is influenced by hawkers' hygiene practices, specifically personal hygiene, cleanliness of their premises and equipment, and food hygiene. The study concluded that hygiene knowledge and practices among hawkers should be emphasized to produce good and safe food for customers to consume. Future researchers are encouraged to broaden the data collection to include more respondents who can provide a more general perspective on the issues.