A netizen revealed that suspected rat heads were eaten in meals in the school canteen of North China University of Science and Technology, which attracted widespread attention and renewed public concern over food safety, especially on school campuses. Photo: the Paper

 
North China University of Science and Technology announced on Tuesday night that it has terminated its contract with a company in charge of catering for its school canteens and will hold the firm accountable, adding that the company had been found guilty of food hygiene violations in providing catering services.

Earlier on Tuesday, a netizen revealed that suspected rat heads were eaten in meals in the school canteen, which attracted widespread attention and renewed public concern over food safety, especially on school campuses.

A student posted photos on social media of what appeared to be a rat's head in a meal from a school cafeteria, saying that his roommate had just paid for it, with the canteen staff claiming it was beef after the student raised questions about foreign objects in the meal.

Another netizen posted a similar photo of the suspected rat head on a community forums operated by the university and wrote, "Look at the mouth, hair and whisker."

The catering contractor, Ningbo Jianghui Food and Beverage Co., Ltd., participated in the tender of the student canteen entrusted project of North China University of Science and Technology on July 27, 2023 and won the bid, the university's logistics service center said in an announcement on the school website.

There are a total of four student canteen-halls across the university, and Ningbo Jianghui Food Catering Co., Ltd. is responsible for operating the catering service on the second floor of one of the canteen-halls. Only a few stalls of the involved canteen remained open after the incident.

According to public information, Ningbo Jianghui Food and Catering Co., Ltd. was established on January 29, 2004. The company said on its official website that canteen contracting was its core business, and showed 63 successful cases contracted from 2002 to 2021, including a number of universities and middle schools in the list.

North China University of Science and Technology has terminated its arrangement with the company for allegedly violating food hygiene regulations and causing food hygiene problems in the course of operations, according to a statement.

The market supervision bureau of Caofeidian District in Tangshan, North China's Hebei Province, where North China University of Science and Technology is located, confirmed on Wednesday that officials from local authorities and the head of the market supervision bureau had led a team to the campus on Tuesday night to investigate and verify the incident, and would later release an announcement on the results of the investigation.

This is not the first time a similar incident has occurred. Earlier in June, a provincial joint investigation team in East China's Jiangxi Province released the results of their probe into the incident of the unusual object discovered in a student's meal at a college canteen in the provincial capital Nanchang and said that the item was indeed a "rat head" rather than a "duck neck," diverging from the initial findings released by the local market watchdog which lacked careful investigation and evidence collection.

Several food safety incidents have been reported across the country, triggering public concern over the food safety risks on campuses. In response, special rectification campaigns have already been launched across schools nationwide to strictly prevent and control food safety risks on campus.

"The frequent occurrence of food hygiene incidents on campus urges food safety supervision departments at all levels of our country to introduce more strict and effective measures to prevent the recurrence of such incidents," one netizen on the Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo wrote, "What is more important than safeguarding the food hygiene and safety in the campus?" They posed.

Global Times