City of Masvingo (Registration and Licensed Premises) By-laws, 2025
Masvingo now licenses every food and service premises — cafés, butcheries, bakeries, salons, laundries, stables, grinding mills, LPG traders, sand miners, boat cruises and fish ponds — with detailed hygiene and construction standards for each.
These by-laws require registration and licensing of a wide range of premises in the City of Masvingo, and set the standards each must meet.
General requirements apply to all food-handling premises, with additional requirements for cafés, restaurants, tea-rooms, hotels, boarding houses and lodging rooms; butchers and fishmongers; bakeries and food factories; food purveyors and caterers; barbers and hairdressers; laundries, launderettes and laundry depots; and stables and premises keeping equine animals.
The by-laws also license bulk water supply, grain buying, liquefied petroleum gas trading, grinding mills, sand mining, sand abstraction, boat cruising, fish ponds and service providers generally, and require the licence, registration certificate and the by-laws themselves to be displayed on the premises.
The trade-specific standards are exacting — refrigerated storage and non-corrodible fittings for butchers, dedicated meat vehicles with separate offal compartments, approved dough machines and furnace siting for bakeries, and equivalent rules for the other trades — with the officer of health able to relax certain requirements for premises that predate the by-laws where compliance is impracticable and no health risk arises.
The extract available here was truncated before the fee and penalty schedules, so the licence fees and fines should be read in the instrument itself. Near-identical by-laws were made for Chivi, Shurugwi and Insiza in the same season.
What changed
- Registration and licensing required for all food-handling and listed service premises
- Trade-specific construction and hygiene standards for cafés, butcheries, bakeries, salons, laundries and stables
- Bulk water, grain buying, LPG trading, grinding mills, sand mining and abstraction, boat cruising and fish ponds licensed
- Licences, registration certificates and the by-laws must be displayed on the premises
- The officer of health may relax some requirements for older premises where no health risk arises
Who this affects
- Restaurants, butcheries, bakeries and food shops in Masvingo
- Salons, laundries and grinding mills
- LPG traders and bulk water suppliers
- Sand miners, boat cruise and fish pond operators
- Council environmental health officers
Plain-language summary — not legal advice. Always read the full instrument.