A Study of the Food Safety Practices of Street Food Vendors/Chefs and Street Food Consumers in Trinidad and Tobago

by Mr Mervin Jack

Street food is a dietary staple in Trinidad and Tobago, situated at the intersection of public health, the informal economy, and development policy. This study uses a multi-stakeholder, concurrent mixed-methods design to examine food safety practices among vendors, consumers, and regulators. The seminar reports progress on two strands of the research: a comparative analysis of food safety governance across multiple high-income and developing jurisdictions, and a consumer knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) survey conducted using a structured point-of-purchase intercept design informed by Cochran's sampling formula.

The comparative analysis examines patterns of convergence and divergence in international food safety governance, situating Trinidad and Tobago within this landscape and distinguishing between the design of legal frameworks and their implementation capacity. From this, a model of governance effectiveness is proposed, organised around implementation capacity, environmental conditions at the point of vending, and institutional coordination.

The consumer strand applies the KAP framework and the Health Belief Model to examine the relationship between food safety awareness, risk perception, and purchasing behaviour. The seminar develops the study's central theoretical contribution, the "structured KAP gap", which reconceptualises the disconnect between knowledge and protective behaviour as a structurally reproduced phenomenon rather than an informational deficit. A behavioural pathway model is proposed to trace how knowledge, risk normalisation, cultural embeddedness, and structural constraints culminate in system-level governance failure.

The seminar concludes by outlining implications for food safety policy and the remaining vendor, observational, and regulatory strands needed for full cross-stakeholder integration.

Wednesday 29 July, 2026 at 1:00 p.m.

ZOOM | CLICK HERE to attend

Mr Mervin Jack is a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) candidate within UTT’s Biosciences, Agriculture and Food Technologies programme, and the first student from the University to participate in an ICM Erasmus+ Ph.D. mobility programme. His research sits at the intersection of food safety governance, public health, and culinary practice, driven by a commitment to building safer, more accountable informal food systems across the Caribbean.

His doctoral study, "A Study of the Food Safety Practices of Street Food Vendors/Chefs and Street Food Consumers in Trinidad and Tobago", has completed extensive fieldwork encompassing structured surveys of street food vendors, consumers, regulatory authorities, public health inspectors, and medical and public health professionals. The study represents one of the most comprehensive examinations of street food safety governance yet conducted in Trinidad and Tobago, supported by the breadth of its stakeholder coverage and its integration of internationally recognised frameworks including the KAP model, the Health Belief Model, and the WHO Five Keys to Safer Food.

Beyond his research, Mervin is a trained culinary professional with senior kitchen experience and the Executive Chef and Owner of Medjai's Culinary Maestros. This grounding in professional food practice informs his academic work in ways that are rare among food safety researchers, connecting policy and governance questions directly to the realities of culinary production and food service.