Food Safety Works, a consulting company, sees the need for food business operators (FBOs) to adhere to high quality safety protocols in their kitchens to prevent food-borne illness. This according to the company spans from planning, design to implementation of operations in setting up kitchens.
Ramesh Agarwal, COO, Food Safety Works, told F&B News in an email: “We see food safety as a scientific discipline providing ways to handle, prepare, and store food that prevent food-borne illnesses. It is not an afterthought but an integral part of any food business. It is also a regulatory requirement which FSSAI illustrates in its Schedule 4, right from planning to set up a kitchen, designing, implementation, training staff, audit of the unit to packaging and labelling FBOs need to focus on good practices to ensure safe food is delivered. While all of this might sound rudimentary, we find so many FBOs falter on this.”
Quoting a report, Agarwal said that US FDA rejected over 2,100 import batches of ‘made in India’ with the reasons for rejection varying from minor labelling issues to products manufactured in unhygienic conditions to presence of pesticides being above permissible limit.
“Our expertise in this space can help avoid such situations. While planning a kitchen having the right space allocation and provisioning for all the requirements is an absolute must. The design must incorporate the flow of man, material, water, air, and drainage facility. Having the right design can make it easy to implement systems and processes as mandated by the regulator as well as by standards like HACCP, ISO22000, FSSC22000, BRC, FSMA. Right design helps to significantly reduce cross-contamination,” he said.
The kitchen operations need to factor in the requirements for food safety. To ensure predictability pre-requisite programmes have to setup, SOPs documented, and systems must be monitored and verified.
“Now food safety requires everyone to be aware of the systems and processes. FSSAI mandates that every unit must have at least one certified food safety supervisor for every 25 food handlers,” said Agarwal.
Audits too are an integral part of any system where periodic checks are needed to see if the systems are working suitably. A 2nd party audit is also an excellent way to receive an independent view of how things are going. Even FSSAI Hygiene Rating Audits provide the credibility of being verified by a certified agency too.
“Further it is not enough just to follow the process but also important to label the product as per the country’s regulation. Companies should ensure that the product complies with the requirements of product category, permissible ingredients, declaration on the labels, validation of the claims made,” he said.
The Bengaluru-based company chips in consulting expertise to help FBOs across factories, restaurants, retail and delivery companies as well as corporate houses with large cafe operations implement Food Safety Management Systems (FSMS).The company said that it is also the largest FSSAI :FoSTaC training partner based out of Karnataka and also a Hygiene Rating partner. It has a document management system: FoodProDocs that significantly reduces the time to implement a FSMS by reducing the time required in documentation.