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Why food safety cannot end with a raid
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Monday, 21 September, 2026, 16 : 00 PM [IST]
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Ashwin Bhadri
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There is something reassuring about seeing a food-safety raid on the news. Someone has found the problem. An officer has walked into a premises, seen what should not be there and taken action. For the public, that can bring a sense of relief. At least somebody is checking.
Inspections and raids are an important part of food safety. They can uncover poor hygiene, bad storage practices, pest activity, expired products and unsafe handling. Sometimes, simply putting a business under scrutiny is enough to stop a practice that should never have been happening in the first place. But there is another side to the story that is much harder to see.
What if the premises looks fine? What if the kitchen is clean, the workers are wearing the right protective clothing and the records are neatly maintained, but there is something wrong with the food itself?
You cannot see most microbiological contamination with your eyes. You cannot smell every chemical contaminant. You cannot tell from the appearance of a product whether what is written on its label accurately reflects what is inside.
This is something I have come to appreciate much more over the years. After more than two decades in food safety, I have seen businesses put considerable effort into getting their processes right. And that effort matters. Food safety needs procedures, training, supplier controls, audits and documentation. But there is a point at which we have to stop looking at the system and look at the product. A file can tell you that a procedure exists, it cannot tell you what happened to today's batch.
That distinction is easy to miss, consider a supplier's test certificate. It is useful. It gives a business some evidence about the material it has received. But it is evidence of a particular sample, at a particular point in time. It should not become a blanket assurance that every future delivery will be exactly the same.
The food supply chain simply does not work that way. Raw materials vary. Suppliers change. Storage conditions change. Production environments change. Sometimes a small deviation goes unnoticed because people are dealing with hundreds of other things at the same time. None of this is particularly unusual. That is precisely why verification matters. Yet testing is often treated as something we do when there is already a reason to be concerned. Compliant has been reported by customer because of unusual activity noticed then the regulator collects a sample and the batch has totally failed.
Then the investigation begins. Where did it happen? Which batch was affected? How long has this been going on? Those are important questions. But they are questions we are asking after the event. Regular, risk-based testing gives a business the opportunity to ask some of them earlier.
It can provide a check on raw materials and finished products. It can reveal variation that may otherwise go unnoticed. More importantly, it gives the business something that paperwork alone cannot provide: evidence about the product itself.
I don't mean that businesses should send every product for every possible test. That would turn testing into another ritual of compliance, and more testing does not automatically mean better food safety.
The starting point should be the risk. What can go wrong with this product? Where could it go wrong? What needs to be verified? What would tell us that something has changed? Those questions are far more useful than simply asking whether a test has been done. And when the results come back, they need to be looked at properly.
A single report may tell you something about a single sample. A series of reports can tell you much more. If a particular raw material keeps showing variation, that deserves a conversation with the supplier. If results begin moving in an unexpected direction, someone should be asking what changed.
That is where testing becomes part of decision-making rather than paperwork. None of this takes away from the role of enforcement. Regulators have to be able to inspect businesses and act when they find violations. Consumers should be able to expect that food businesses will meet the standards set for them. But I don't think the industry should be comfortable with a system in which the regulator has to discover every problem first.
A food business should know its own risks. It should know which suppliers need closer scrutiny, which raw materials are critical, where its processes are vulnerable and what its test results are telling it. That, to me, is the difference between compliance and control.
Recent food-safety action in Maharashtra has brought the enforcement side of this conversation into focus. It has also raised a bigger question for the industry: how many problems could be identified before a raid; a complaint or a failed inspection forces us to look for them?
A raid can point us towards the failure. The laboratory can help us understand the failure. And the responsibility of the food business is to use that information before the consumer has to become the warning signal. Food safety is ultimately not about how good the paperwork looks or how clean a facility appears during an inspection. Those things matter but the final test is much simpler. What is actually in the food? We should know that before the consumer has to find out the hard way.
(The author is CEO at Equinox Labs)
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