In July 2024, the former DHEC was dissolved and the South Carolina Department of Agriculture took on some important new duties related to food safety. Let’s take a look at how that’s going.

We now inspect restaurants under the Retail Food Safety program.

• Added 10+ inspectors
• Since July 1, we have done 48,766 inspections on the 24,197 permitted Retail Food Establishments.
• We prioritize inspections based on the risk level assigned to the facility.
• We are close to fully meeting our inspection frequency goals.
• New org structure, expedited decision making
• Consistency among regions to provide fair inspections across state.

We also took on Milk Safety and the Milk Lab.

• We inspect dairies and test milk.
• We took on the new USDA-mandated responsibility of testing milk for HPAI.
• Things have gone very smoothly with that transition.

Additional duties that we are handling are bottled water, soft drinks, ice machines, frozen desserts, and cheese regulation. 

Taking on these programs doubled the size of our agency.

We’ve been able to instill our positive, solution-oriented culture in employees who transferred.

I’d like to thank the public and the regulated businesses for their patience and support.