Food service industry under fire, complaints up 67.5% in first half

Complaints in food service industry soared by 67.5 percent in the first half of 2014, the highest increase among all industries, Beijing Business Daily reported Wednesday Aug 6.

The China Consumers' Association (CCA) received 1,093 complaints on food quality and 1,280 on catering contracts, the association said Tuesday.

CCA said some catering enterprises used practices banned by a newly revised Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits long-entrenched rules including "no outside beverages", "minimum fees for private rooms" and "corkage fees". The report indicates that those were the major reasons for the high complaint rate.

In the first half of this year, the association settled 300,000 consumer complaints in total, which accounted for 92.7 percent of the nearly 330,000 cases received. The association helped consumers retrieve 670 million RMB ($108 million) in economic losses.