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“We are focussing on building a culture of self-compliance”
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Monday, 18 April, 2022, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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 The FSSAI has been in the forefront of getting food safety in the country aligned with global best practices. The Indian food regulator in recent times has pushed several key regulations including front of the pack labelling, inspection of foreign food manufacturers and it also revised the entire nutraceutical regulations. Arun Singhal, the Chief Executive Officer, FSSAI, in an interview with Ashwani Maindola, spoke at length about issues related to food safety. Excerpts:
How do you analyse the overall development with regards to the regulatory framework of food safety in the country?
As the apex food regulatory body, FSSAI’s mandate is to ensure safe and wholesome food for the country. In the past few years, the food regulator has been actively working to enhance the entire food ecosystem to ensure food safety. Significant progress has been made towards improving the ease of doing business. Food businesses have been provided with a comprehensive mechanism to easily understand various regulatory requirements through a single interface. Improvements are being made in existing portals of licensing & registration, imports and testing mechanism by making them more user-friendly for food businesses. The food regulator has been working towards revision of FSS (Licensing & Registration) Regulations that would simplify the process of both application and renewal, thus entailing reduced time and effort.
FSSAI’s role is vital to ensure maintenance of food quality throughout the food value chain, be it in the inspection of food manufacturing facilities or at the distribution or retail level. To ensure better quality control of food manufactured/distributed/supplied in the market, we have ensured that all FSSAI notified labs are NABL accredited and have the capability to analyse various food matrixes. Further, we are developing the capacities of our lab personnel and providing funds to states/ UTs for modernisation of the existing state food laboratories. Today, FSSAI has a network of 227 notified testing laboratories for food testing across the country and 20 referral laboratories. To further strengthen the food testing capabilities, FSSAI has approved 75 rapid food testing kits/devices to ensure faster, better and cheaper real-time testing of food even at the field level. FSSAI is also focussing on periodic risk-based inspections, third-party audits and checks to ensure safety and quality of food products available in the market to earn the trust of consumers.
FSSAI has significantly accelerated the training and capacity building of personnel in food businesses (both in the organised and unorganised sector) through the Food Safety Training and Certification (FoSTaC) - a unique programme to ensure that there is a trained and certified Food Safety Supervisor (FSS) on each food business premises. Almost 8.8 lakh FSS have been trained so far.
Given the large unorganised food sector in India - comprising a range of small food businesses like street food vendors, dhabas, eateries etc. - several benchmarking and certification schemes are in place to improve their food safety and hygiene standards. We are extensively focussing our efforts on building a culture of self-compliance through third-party audits of food businesses and schemes like hygiene rating audits of food service establishments. Over a 1,000 food outlets have been hygiene rated so far to empower consumers to make informed food choices.
Schemes such as 'Clean Street Food Hub', 'Clean and Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Markets', 'Eat Right Station' and 'Blissful Hygienic Offering to God' (BHOG) for places of worship are targeted towards clusters of vendors. So far, 39 Clean Street Food Hubs, 13 Clean and Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Markets, 9 Eat Right Stations and 592 BHOG certifications have been awarded, thereby raising the confidence of consumers in consuming food from local street food hubs. The 'Hygiene Rating Scheme' has been introduced for individual outlets such as restaurants, catering establishments, sweet and meat shops.
How FSSAI aligns itself with the global best practices vis-à-vis food safety and also incorporating local best practices?
The highly globalised market today, demands safe and high quality food products. Hence, we need to ensure that all food products are produced and manufactured to match high food standards both for the domestic consumption as well as exports. The harmonisation of food standards, in fact, can be viewed as a necessary pre-requisite to ensure the quality of domestically produced food products and allowing fullest possible facilitation for imports and exports.
Codex standards are extremely important for consumer protection and facilitation of international trade. Hence, FSSAI had initiated the harmonisation of national food regulations/standards with Codex standards almost a decade back through a consultative process with all stakeholders, based on the recommendations of the scientific support system in the Food Authority. Harmonisation of horizontal safety standards has been accomplished to a large extent in the last few years.
Harmonisation of vertical food standards was also undertaken subsequently and it is expected that we will have many of our food standards at par with the Codex vertical standards in the near future. Nevertheless, the harmonisation process needs to be advanced with much care, as improperly conceived harmonisation of standards across the board, without any prerequisite activities being taken up, will only result in a system which will be frequently subjected to violation as a rule, rather than being followed or adhered. To ensure implementation of prescribed standards, FSSAI puts an equal importance to consultative discussions with our scientific panels and collaboration with related ministries and stakeholders during the process of standards setting and finalisation of regulations.
The front of the pack labelling was discussed at length in recent times. Now FSSAI has chosen to use Health Star ratings, which is contested by the consumer organisations. What is your analysis on the proposal and its impact on general food safety and nutrition safety? Based on the consensus of all stakeholders in the meeting held on June 30, 2021, FSSAI commissioned a study through IIM, Ahmedabad in September, 2021. They conducted a randomised controlled trial (RCT) with sample size of 20,564 respondents covering all major states of India. The randomised trial groups were based on one of the following FOPLs- Health Star Rating (HSR), Nutriscore, Warning label, Multiple traffic lights (MTL) and Monochrome GDA along with a control group (No FOPL). The findings of the report recommended Star Rating as the preferred FOPL. The report was presented by IIM, Ahmedabad in the meeting held with all the stakeholders on February 15, 2022, and it was recommended to incorporate Star Rating in the draft regulations.
Some consumer organisations disagreed with IIM’s recommendations. However, it was not felt appropriate to disregard the direct feedback of more than 20,000 Indian consumers obtained through an institution of excellence. Hence, it was decided in the meeting that the draft notification based on the star rating will be placed in the public domain, which would, of course, be open for public comments and consultation. The stakeholders would be given adequate time to provide their comments on the draft regulations, as per the due procedure.
The nutrients identified for assigning health star rating to a food product are Energy, Saturated Fats, Total Sugars and Sodium (Salt). A few positive nutrients have also been identified such as Fruits and Vegetable content, Nuts/ Legumes/ Millets, Fibre and Protein content in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the nutritional content in any food product. Based on the points achieved by each of these nutrients, a star rating will be assigned to a particular food product.
Recently the FSSAI notified the inspection of the foreign food manufacturer regulations. In what way do you think it would help the Indian food safety ecosystem?
As per the amended regulations, foreign food manufacturing facilities that make products in certain categories for export to India are now required to register with the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India. Such manufacturing facilities can directly or through an authorised representative apply for registration along with the documents required and prescribed fee. These units may also be inspected by the food safety officials anytime during the registration process or upon issuance of the same, at a later stage.
With this regulation coming into place, there will be increased compliances and will enable the Food Authority to have a better oversight of the processes in the entire food supply chain in trade.
FSSAI has also recently issued a direction for enabling the provisions for digitisation of enforcement activities through FoSCoS App, which includes sample details, improvement notice, adjudication, online penalties and was implemented as mandatory from 1st October 2021. It’s been a long time since the implementation started, how do you assess the initial response from the stakeholders and what objectives FSSAI want to achieve through this FoSCoS App. Last year in October 2021, FSSAI had ordered States/UTs to mandatorily digitise/record enforcement activities on the FoSCoS platform. The matter is being regularly pursued with States/UTs, at every platform. While the situation is improving, it is still early to depict the actual assessment of digitisation efforts made by each and every State/ UT.
During FY 2021-22, approximately 2.20 lakh inspections have been recorded in FoSCoS. Tamil Nadu has significantly done well in terms of the digital inspections followed by the states like Maharashtra, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh.
A constant push towards digitisation is required and FSSAI is consistently pursuing this issue with Food Safety Commissioners. The States/UTs need to come forward and direct their field officers to mandatorily use FoSCoS/ FoSCoRIS for all enforcement activities as it leads to creation of a digital history of the food businesses, which can be utilised for risk based inspections in future.
There were many notices issued by FSSAI asking for modification of licences of manufacturers from erstwhile FLRS to FoSCoS. What is the status of licensing in India & Can you share data related to licensing of food businesses in India?
The purpose of mandatory modification of manufacturing licences upon upgradation of the old licensing system into an advanced compliance based system (FoSCoS), is to have a clear identification of the manufacturers based on the commodities they manufacture. Further, improved data analytics helps in better policy formulation and would help make policies regarding enforcement activities at the field level. Till now, approximately 60 per cent of the manufacturers have modified their licence as per the standardised product selection methodology of FoSCoS.
As on March 31, 2022, there are 49,757 active Central Licenses, 8,25,513 State Licenses, and 36,65,397 registered food businesses in the country. Added together, this gives a figure of total 45.40 lakh food businesses.
Recently the entire –nutraaceuticals regulation- has been replaced by the newer regulation (nutra regulation 2022) and made operationalised. What were the new developments that led to this decision?
FSSAI has overhauled the Food Safety and Standards (Health Supplements, Nutraceuticals, Food for Special Dietary Use, Food for Special Medical Purpose, Functional Food and Novel Food) Regulations, 2016 and drafted a new framework called as FSS (Health Supplements, Nutraceuticals, Food for Special Dietary Use, Food for Special Medical Purpose and Prebiotic and Probiotic Food) Regulations, 2022 (operationalised on 1stApril 2022) to remove ambiguity and make it more stakeholder friendly and easy to comprehend.
Articles of food falling under these regulations are specially processed or formulated for specific nutritional or dietary purpose and shall be clearly distinguishable from foods intended for normal consumption. This will benefit the nutraceutical sector to have clear guidelines and will also enable field functionaries to ensure better compliance at the ground level.
Categories covered under these regulations include- i. Health Supplements (HS) ii. Nutraceuticals (Nutra) iii. Food for Special Dietary Use (FSDU) iv. Food for Special Medical Purpose(FSMP) v. Prebiotic food and Probiotic food (Pre-Pro). The regulations have been operationalised with immediate effect because there is not much fundamental change in the provisions, only a reorganisation of clauses for ease of understanding.
And, finally, how do you assess the progress made by the states in ensuring food safety and how FSSAI is facilitating states in doing so?
FSSAI has introduced the State Food Safety Index (SFSI) to measure the performance of States/UTs across 5 significant parameters of food safety based on pre-defined weightages. These are:
- Human Resource & Institutional Data
- Compliance & Enforcement
- Food Testing – Infrastructure & Surveillance
- Training & Capacity Building; and
- Consumer Empowerment
The Index has inspired a spirit of competition amongst States/UTs to strengthen the food safety ecosystem and to improve their ranking in the Index. Apart from this, FSSAI takes an overview of the performances of States/UTs on a quarterly basis and provides suggestions for improvement if any.
More recently, we have also started providing technical and financial assistance to States/UTs for creation of necessary infrastructure, testing equipment and mobilising resources for carrying out special camps, inspections, awareness drives, etc. by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). States are required to evaluate the food safety environment and draw up a holistic action plan to make the improvements required. This has certainly provided an impetus to the States/UTs who were initially lagging behind across parameters.
To further facilitate State Food Safety Departments, FSSAI is actively investing in training and capacity building of Food Safety Officers (FSOs) and field-level staff along with the Central Food Safety Officers (CFSOs) deployed across regional offices.
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