Is Online Food Safety Training Accredited and Accepted in South Africa?

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Accreditation · R638 and online training

By Mthokozisi Nkosi, food scientist, registered Lead Auditor with Exemplar Global and IRCA, and one of four SAATCA registered R638:2018 Lead Implementers. Founder of ASC Food Safety Consultants. Last updated 9 September 2026.

Is online food safety training accredited in South Africa?

Online food safety training is neither accredited nor prohibited by South African law, because no South African law names an accredited food safety course at all. Regulation 10(1)(a) of R638 of 2018, in force since 22 June 2019, requires the person in charge to be suitably qualified or otherwise adequately trained in the principles and practices of food safety and hygiene, as appropriate, and that the training is accredited or conducted by an inspector, where applicable. That is a competence outcome, not a purchase instruction.

R638 is the Regulations Governing General Hygiene Requirements for Food Premises, the Transport of Food and Related Matters, Government Notice R.638 in Government Gazette 41730 of 22 June 2018, made under the Foodstuffs, Cosmetics and Disinfectants Act 54 of 1972 and administered by the National Department of Health. It runs to seventeen regulations covering the Certificate of Acceptability, premises, facilities, equipment, temperature control, food handler health and transport. Exactly one of those regulations deals with training, and it is four short subparagraphs long.

Read those four subparagraphs and you will not find the name of a single course. You will not find a provider list, a unit standard, a SETA qualification, a syllabus, a minimum duration, an expiry date or a sentence about classrooms or computers. People assume the gap must be filled somewhere else, in a circular or a national standard. I have looked, and it is not.

What R638 does carry is teeth. Regulation 15 makes a contravention an offence, and the penalty comes from section 18(1) of Act 54 of 1972: on first conviction a fine or imprisonment not exceeding six months or both, rising to twelve months on a second conviction and twenty-four months on a third or subsequent one. If it is the Certificate of Acceptability application itself you need to work through, our step by step guide to applying for a Certificate of Acceptability takes that process from start to finish.

What regulation 10(1) of R638 actually says, and what it does not say

Regulation 10(1) tells the person in charge to be trained, to ensure the workers on the premises are trained, to assess whether the training worked, and to keep the records. The wording is deliberately outcome based. It uses the word accredited exactly once, and that single use sits behind an alternative and a condition, which is why it cannot be read as a universal accreditation mandate.

A person in charge of food premises must ensure that he or she is suitably qualified or otherwise adequately trained in the principles and practices of food safety and hygiene, as appropriate, and that the training is accredited or conducted by an inspector, where applicable.Regulation 10(1)(a), R638 of 2018, commenced 22 June 2019

A person in charge of food premises must ensure that any other person working on the food premises, is suitably qualified or adequately trained in the principles and practices of food safety and hygiene, as appropriate, by an inspector or any other suitable person.Regulation 10(1)(b), R638 of 2018

Suitably qualified or otherwise adequately trained. Two routes, joined by or. A formal qualification is one way to satisfy the clause. Adequate training is the other, and the word otherwise makes clear that the second route is not a lesser substitute for the first, it is an equal alternative. A person with a food technology degree and no short course can satisfy 10(1)(a). So can a person with no degree who has been properly trained and assessed.

As appropriate. This is the proportionality lever. The training a person in charge of a hospital kitchen needs is not the training the person in charge of a fruit stall needs. An inspector applies the clause to your operation, your food, your risk. It also means that a course pitched far below your risk profile, a one hour awareness video for a caterer running cook chill, is arguably not appropriate even though a certificate exists.

Accredited or conducted by an inspector, where applicable. Two qualifiers on one word. First, accreditation is offered as an alternative to training delivered by an inspector, which tells you the drafter’s goal was credible delivery, not a specific stamp. Second, and more decisively, the phrase where applicable would be meaningless if accreditation applied in every case. The regulation does not define when accreditation is applicable, by whom it must be granted, or against what scheme. That undefined space is where every accreditation argument in South African food safety training actually happens.

By an inspector or any other suitable person. Subparagraph 10(1)(b), which covers everyone else on the premises, drops the word accredited entirely. For your food handlers, R638 asks for suitable and adequate, delivered by a suitable person. That is a lower formal bar than 10(1)(a), which is why food handler training is where the market is loosest and where quality varies most. Our guide to food handler training in South Africa deals with that layer specifically.

Why regulation 10(1)(c) and 10(1)(d) decide your inspection

Most people prepare for the certificate and get caught by the record. Regulation 10(1)(c) requires routine assessments to determine the impact of training, and 10(1)(d) requires training programmes and records to be kept, routinely updated and produced to an inspector on request. Those two subparagraphs are the ones an environmental health practitioner can test on the spot, in your office, in ninety seconds.

[A person in charge of food premises must ensure that] routine assessments are conducted to determine the impact of the training; and training programmes and records are kept and routinely updated, as applicable, and are made available to an inspector on request.Regulation 10(1)(c) and 10(1)(d), R638 of 2018

Subparagraph (a) asks for a state of affairs, competence, which is hard to test in a corridor. Subparagraph (d) asks for a document, which is trivially easy. The inspector asks the easy question first: show me your training records. A shop that produces a clean list of every person trained, on what, when, with what assessment result, and can print the certificate, has answered (a), (b), (c) and (d) in one movement. A shop that produces a creased certificate for a manager who left in March has answered nothing.

On a site I audited, the person in charge answered the training question by putting a lever arch file on the table and opening it at a wallet of certificates. She could not tell me which of those people still worked there, and two of them did not. There was no register, so the file was the register, and a file is a poor register. We rebuilt it that afternoon on a single sheet: name, identity number, role, course, date, assessment result, certificate number. It took less than an hour and it cost nothing, which makes it the cheapest compliance work I have ever watched anyone do.

This is also the part where delivery mode helps rather than hurts you. A properly built online course generates the record automatically: enrolment date, completion date, assessment score, certificate number, all retrievable years later. A one day classroom session generates a photocopy that lives in a drawer until it does not. If you run more than a handful of staff, the ASC manager dashboard holds that register for you and lets you export it when the inspector asks, which is the practical answer to 10(1)(d).

Who the accreditation bodies actually are, and what each one means

SAATCA, FoodBev SETA, the QCTO and the HPCSA get used interchangeably in South African food safety training marketing, and they mean completely different things. SAATCA registers training course providers and approves courses. FoodBev SETA accredits providers against specific registered qualifications. The QCTO issues occupational qualifications. The HPCSA registers individual health professionals and accredits CPD activities for them, which earns a registered practitioner CEUs and is not an approval of a course for R638.

The HPCSA row needs saying plainly rather than in a cell. If you see a food safety course advertised as HPCSA accredited, ask what is meant by it, because there is only one thing it can properly mean: the course is an accredited CPD activity and a registered practitioner earns CEUs for completing it. ASC courses hold HPCSA CPD accreditation, and we say CPD every time precisely because the shorter phrase invites people to hear something it does not say. It claims nothing about the course. I hold that registration personally, and that is the only way it may ever be stated in relation to our training. Older pages across this industry, including some of our own historical pages, have got this wrong. It is being corrected wherever it appears.

SANAS is the national accreditation body and the layer above most of this. SANAS accredits bodies, and SAATCA holds that accreditation. So when a provider is registered with SAATCA, the chain runs provider to SAATCA to SANAS. That is a real chain you can trace. It is still not a municipal approval.

Do municipalities accept online food handler certificates?

No national rule tells a municipality whether to accept an online food handler certificate. R638 names no approved providers, no minimum hours, no renewal period and no delivery mode. Acceptance sits with the individual environmental health practitioner and the municipality. No Department of Health circular, no SAIEH position statement and no municipal document endorsing or prohibiting e-learning certificates could be found.

That finding is not a claim that online certificates are rejected, nor that they are accepted. It is a statement about the published record: I went looking for the national instrument that would settle the question, and nothing in R638, nothing in Act 54 of 1972, no departmental circular and no professional body position speaks to delivery mode at all.

The consequence follows directly. Any provider claiming that their online certificate is accepted by municipalities nationwide is making a marketing assertion, not stating a verifiable fact. There is no instrument that could make that statement true, because there is no national acceptance mechanism to point at. ASC will not make that claim, and you should treat any provider who does as having told you something useful about how carefully they handle the rest of their claims.

The version of this I see most often is an operator who bought training on price and then found, at inspection, that nobody could say where the certificate came from. The inspector did not ask whether the course had been online. He asked who the provider was and whether there was a number he could check. The operator had a PDF with a logo on it and no number, and the conversation went badly from there. The delivery mode had nothing to do with it. The certificate could not be traced back to a real organisation.

What actually happens in practice is that the environmental health practitioner assessing your premises exercises judgement under regulation 10(1), premises by premises, applying the words suitably qualified or otherwise adequately trained and as appropriate to what is in front of them. Different practitioners in different municipalities apply that judgement differently, which is exactly what a discretionary standard produces. Our municipality by municipality guide to the Certificate of Acceptability and the city by city R638 training guide exist because that local variation is real.

The practical move is simple and almost nobody does it. Before you buy training, email your municipal environmental health office, name the course you intend to use, name the provider and its registration number, state the duration and the mode, and ask whether they have any requirement beyond regulation 10(1). Keep the reply. If the answer is that they have no additional requirement, you have written evidence that you asked. If the answer names a preference, you have saved yourself a wasted purchase.

What an environmental health practitioner actually looks for when checking training

An inspector checking regulation 10(1) is not auditing your provider’s accreditation portfolio. They are looking for evidence that the people handling food know what they are doing, and that you can prove it on paper. In my experience on both sides of that conversation, the check runs in a rough order: the person in charge, the records, the content, the assessment, and only then the certificate itself.

The person in charge first

Regulation 10(1)(a) is a personal duty. The inspector wants to know who the person in charge is and what training that named individual has. A company wide statement that staff are trained does not answer it. If the person in charge changed, remember that regulation 3(8) requires the local authority to be informed in writing within 30 days, and the training question follows the new person.

Records before certificates

The request is usually phrased as show me your training records, not show me your certificate. That phrasing comes straight from 10(1)(d). A register that lists everyone, current and correctly dated, answers a question a single certificate cannot.

Content appropriate to the operation

As appropriate is the phrase that gets applied here. A four hour hygiene awareness certificate is a reasonable answer for a general assistant in a small retail outlet. It is a thin answer for the person responsible for temperature control, cleaning schedules and supplier acceptance across a busy kitchen. Match the depth of training to the risk of the job.

Evidence that the training landed

Regulation 10(1)(c) asks about impact. An assessment result is the cleanest evidence of impact available to a small business. A signed attendance register is not an assessment. If your provider issues certificates without an assessment, you have a certificate and no evidence.

The certificate, last

By the time the inspector reaches the certificate, the substance has already been established. What they check on the document itself is that it names a real person, names a real provider, carries a date and can be verified. A certificate with no verification route is a piece of paper making an assertion about itself.

What makes an online course defensible at inspection

An online course is defensible when it produces the same evidence a good classroom course produces, and holds it better. That means real content mapped to R638, a scored assessment with a pass mark, a certificate carrying a unique verifiable number, a provider whose registration is publicly checkable, and a durable record of who was trained and when. Delivery mode is not the variable that matters. Evidence is.

A QR code lets an inspector verify the certificate while standing in front of you. A photocopy cannot. The same goes for retrievability: the record survives a manager leaving, a file being lost and a fire in the office, which is precisely the failure mode that turns a compliant business into a non compliant one on paper. If you want to see how the content maps to the regulation before you buy, our curriculum walkthrough of the ASC R638 course sets out every module.

NQF registered qualification or certificate of competence: which one do you need?

NQF registered occupational qualifications and part qualifications run down one lane, quality assured by the QCTO through a SETA, credit bearing and gated by an External Integrated Summative Assessment. Non NQF short courses ending in a certificate of competence run down the other. They carry no NQF level, and they are what industry, retailer second party audits and most environmental health practitioners accept for R638 purposes.

The choice is genuinely about purpose rather than quality. If you are building a career, the NQF lane gives you a portable, credit bearing qualification, and our guide on how to become a food safety officer in South Africa maps that route. If you have an inspection date, a CoA application in progress or a retailer asking for evidence next month, the short course lane answers the question you actually have.

One historical note that trips buyers up: FoodBev SETA accreditation is scope bound, and no applications against legacy unit standard qualifications were accepted after 15 June 2024 as the system moved to QCTO occupational qualifications. So a provider quoting a unit standard number at you is quoting from a system that is being wound down. Ask what the accreditation covers today, not what it covered in 2019. For what all of this costs across the market, see our South African food safety training price guide.

Is a SAATCA certificate recognised, and how do you check any accreditation claim?

A SAATCA certificate is recognised in the sense that the provider’s registration and course approval sit on a public register anyone can open, and in no other sense, because no municipality is bound by it. Every real accreditation or registration in South African food safety training can be stated as a named body, a number and a scope. If a provider cannot give you all three in one sentence, the claim is decoration.

SAATCA publishes that register of online registered training course providers precisely so that buyers can check. Use it on every provider you consider, including ASC, which appears on it as No. 065 with the approved course listed as R638 Food Safety for Person in Charge. The register lists many providers, so you can compare what each holds rather than what each advertises.

The whole check takes about five minutes. Apply it to us: we are ASC Food Safety Training, SAATCA registered training centre TC No. 065, listed on SAATCA’s public register of online registered training course providers, and a FoodBev SETA accredited provider, number 587/00337/1900. Go and look. A provider who is uncomfortable with you verifying them has told you something.

The accreditation claims to be suspicious of

The claims set out below recur in South African food safety training advertising, and each fails against the published record. None of them is a matter of opinion. Each one either stretches a mechanism well past what it does, or asserts a national position that no instrument creates.

HPCSA accredited course, with nothing after it

The only accreditation the HPCSA can give a course is CPD accreditation, which earns CEUs for the practitioners it registers. A provider that says HPCSA accredited and cannot tell you it means CPD, or cannot give you the details, is either being careless or hoping you will hear a regulatory approval that does not exist.

I have been handed a certificate in a manager’s office with the letters HPCSA printed across the bottom of it. He had chosen that course because of those letters, and he had paid more for it. I had to tell him, standing in his own storeroom, that those letters said nothing about whether the course met regulation 10(1), and that he had paid extra for a badge he had misread. He asked me what he was supposed to have checked. The answer is a body, a number and a scope, and nobody teaches buyers to ask for those three.

Government approved or Department of Health approved

R638 approves no courses. The National Department of Health administers the regulation, and the regulation names no provider and no syllabus. There is no approvals list to be on.

Accepted by all municipalities nationwide

No national instrument makes this true. Acceptance sits with the individual environmental health practitioner and municipality, and no circular, position statement or municipal document establishing nationwide acceptance could be found. A provider may believe their certificates have never been refused, which is a business observation, not a regulatory fact.

Legally required course

R638 states a competence outcome, not a course requirement. Training is required. A particular named course is not, and no provider can honestly say the law requires theirs.

Certificate valid for a fixed period, as required by R638

R638 sets no renewal period. A provider may recommend refresher training, which is sound practice and worth doing, but attributing a fixed expiry to the regulation misstates it. Note that the Certificate of Acceptability itself also has no fixed expiry cycle in R638, which is a separate and frequently confused point covered in our guide to the CoA application process.

A rand fine for non compliance

Section 18(1) of Act 54 of 1972 sets imprisonment terms and provides for a fine, but states no rand amount. Any specific rand figure quoted as the R638 penalty has been invented, usually to make an advertisement more frightening.

What ASC claims, and what ASC does not claim

Since this article asks you to interrogate providers, it should hold ASC to the same standard. Here is the full list of what we assert, and the list of things we deliberately do not say even though competitors do. Read both before you buy, and hold us to them.

And the list that matters more, because it is the list nobody publishes.

Every one of those restraints costs us sales against providers who make the fuller claim. It is the correct trade. If a regulator, a retailer or a court ever tests what we said, the statements have to survive the test, and a claim that cannot be verified is a liability sitting inside your compliance file as well as ours.

Frequently asked questions

ASC Food Safety Training · Leading with Science. Ensuring Food Safety. · Fully online, serving all of South Africa and beyond · info@ascfoodsafety.com · WhatsApp +27 61 483 0381 · SAATCA registered training centre (TC No. 065) · FoodBev SETA accredited provider No. 587/00337/1900 · B-BBEE Level 1 · Registered Lead Auditor (Exemplar Global and IRCA) · Consulting and document toolkits at ascfoodsafety.com