This came after some lawmakers questioned why officials only want to outlaw sales of cups smaller than 4.5 centimetres in length or width that contain konjac but not other bigger products or foodstuffs that pose similar choking risks.
A coroner recommended more regulations following the death of a pupil late last year, who choked to death while eating the product at school.
Undersecretary for Environment and Ecology Diane Wong said that while officials don’t have fatality figures for Hong Kong, they made the proposal with reference to some data from Japan.
“There are choking cases from time to time from around the world,” she told lawmakers in a food safety panel meeting.
“In Japan, from 1995 until 2008, there were 54 confirmed choking cases involving cups of konjac jellies.
“In 22 of the cases, people died.
“So we looked at the local and global situations and made our proposal based on the local risk assessment.”
Officials said they came up with the 4.5cm designation because that’s the cut-off in Australia and Malaysia, while noting that the European Union bans all konjac products outright.
The Centre for Food Safety said officials are looking at konjac because it’s harder in texture and to chew compared with food products such as regular jelly.
If the legal changes are passed, the mini-cup ban would come six months afterwards, while food distributors would have to put on warning labels for other konjac products in a year’s time.
The centre said if the product is sold as a multiple-cup pack, there would need to be a warning label on it as a whole and not on every individual cup.
If the product is sold as small packs, however, the centre said then the labels need to be on every single pack.
Officials noted that the legal changes would pose just a small effect on the trade.
That’s because just nine of 112 konjac jelly samples officials checked in the past year were sold in mini-cups, and more than half of the products already contain warning labels.
Lawmaker Chan Hoi-yan, who’s a former Underscretary for Health, said officials shouldn’t just be thinking about bans.
She said there should be more public education about what to do when people choke, such as making first aid courses specifically on choking a mandatory part of the school curriculum.
