The employees of the National Food Safety Agency will work in a new building starting with January. The building represents an architectural monument of local importance situated in Chisinau that was renovated. The inauguration of the new head office took place on December 29, IPN reports.

The restoration works embraced the whole building, from the basement to the roof. The offices, conference halls and the other areas were outfitted with new furniture and equipment. Within the reconstruction project, there was also modernized the food safety management system.

“Now that the building was reconstructed, we will also have information systems by which we will be able to monitor all the lab tests, both those made in the country and abroad. With the support of the World Bank, we are renovating four border inspection and control posts, where samples will be tested by a specialized LIMS system. This way we will find out if the products meet the compliance requirements,” said the Agency’s acting director Grigore Porcescu.

Attending the inaugural ceremony, acting Minister of Agriculture and Food Industry Ion Sula said the new head office will become a symbol of food safety. “From now on, all the employees of the National Food Safety Agency will be concentrated in one place. Earlier, these worked in two different buildings and it was hard to manage the institution. It was a barrier for the agricultural producers too,” he stated.

The architectural monument located on Kogalniceanu St had been reconstructed and restored by a group of architects from Moldova starting with the summer of 2014. The works cost 58 million lei, 19 million lei of which was provided by the Agency, while 39 million lei – by the World Bank-funded Moldova Agriculture Competitiveness Project.