The second day of Images Food & Grocery Forum 2012 being held in Mumbai hosted a lively session titled “Creating Food Safety Culture: Offering of Best Practice Solutions to Every Farm in India” which focussed on traceability and recall of food items as well as addressed food-safety issues.
Kerstin Uhlig, Manager Corporate & PR at Global G.A.P. opened the session by asking what governments are doing to make food safety relevant to Indian companies. She said that grocery retailers need to know where food comes from and where it is produced. Uhlig said: “The challenge for India is how can it bring food safety? Since any government cannot set up a uniform quality system, private organisations have set up their own standards and systems. Global GAP, which has 150 global companies under its ambit, can impact Indian companies with its certification systems and practices.”
Commenting on this, Dr. Hari Prakash, Director, NABCB, Quality Council of India, said: “We are doing a balancing act. We take inputs from industry players and from the government to reach the right solution.” He added, “Farmers in India are more aware now, they may not be educated as in developed countries, but they are very experienced. So India GAP should touch upon very basic standards initially for the farmers. GAP’s benchmarking will really benefit farmers, especially in exports.”
Ravi Mathur, CEO of GS1 India, said that consumers have become very aware of food quality and standards. They want to know about allergens, whether the food contain probiotics and if it is being sourced from a sustainable environment or not.
He said that global traceability standards and recall were set up in collaboration with the industry players. “But with 12,000 kirana stores in India, it is next to impossible to implement them. Taking out advertisements in papers does not mean much because of language barriers across states, high level of illiteracy, etc.” Giving an instance of a food recall situation, he said that during a research on 200 top products in USA, it took 18 days to conduct the research on the products and 42 days to recall them from the retailers’ shelves. In the meanwhile, the products were being bought by the consumers.”
Mathur also warned that whenever a food producer or retailer takes an offending product, he is taking on financial and legal liability. Beside this, there is a lot of malicious information on the Internet with competing companies misleading consumers with falsified information. So it is very important to create trust in the consumers. He said that scanning bar codes on products using a smart phone is a trusted source. GS 1 is currently working on this with some mobile companies.
-Seema Gupta
