Safety Assessment of <i>Donkwa</i> – An Indigenous Maize-Peanut Street- Vended Snack

Abstract

Donkwa is a maize-peanut based street-vended snack commonly consumed in Nigeria and other West African countries. Donkwa is produced from the mixture of roasted-ground peanut and maize with or without addition of pepper, which is then moulded into small shapes. The safety of the street-vended donkwa, which was randomly procured from eight vendors in Southwest, Nigeria was assessed through physical, chemical and microbiological hazard analysis. Hazard analysis was also used to assess the safety of samples obtained along the different processing stages of donkwa obtained from four main processors. The results showed that the street-vended samples were contaminated with sand while the fungi, Staphylococcus spp and Bacillus spp counts ranged from 0.13 to 0.80, 0.50 to 2.50 and 0.25 to 4.75 x 10⁴Cfu/g, respectively. Lead, arsenic and cadbium were respectively present in 7.14, 42.86 and 96.42% of the samples obtained from the processors while the cadbium levels among the positive samples ranged from 0.12 – 10.77 mg/kg which was higher than the permissible level of 0.1mg/kg stipulated by CODEX. The presence of hazards in the samples constitutes a food safety issue and control measures should be enacted to include educating processors and vendors on good hygienic and manufacturing practices in order to reduce or eliminate these hazards.

Keywords: Safety, street foods, hazards, donkwa.