Jan 3, 2020
FSSAI: Alexa, tell the Kids to‘Eat Right’
New Delhi: In a first, the national food regulator has tied up with ecommerce giant Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa and is setting up ‘eat right’ labs in schools, looking to include children in the dialogue on healthy and safe eating.
“A key constituent of the ‘eat right’ campaign is towards children and to address this audience, there are a number of interventions that are based on pulling in these young minds, rather than pushing out content,” Food Safety & Standards Authority of India chief executive officer Pawan Agarwal said.
The programmes are aimed at reaching youth who use Alexa regularly and to work with schools to deliver meal plans based on eating right, he said.
The move comes after the Central government clamped down on junk foods in schools, banning the sale of packaged foods high in fat, salt and sugar in their canteens, messes, hostel kitchens or within 50 metres of their campuses.
“Millennials are more conscious about their diet. A lot of them live in villages but technology is closing the rural-urban divide. Virtually, they are in the same space as urban consumers and it’s aspirational for them to also eat right. We are aware of this,” Agarwal said.
FSSAI, the nodal agency under the ministry of health and family welfare, will use technology extensively to drive conversations on safe and healthy food.
“We want this to become a mainstream conversation and we’re using technologies like virtual and augmented reality to bring in school and college students,” he said.
The ‘eat right’ campaign is linked with concepts such as setting hygiene parameters for street vendors and hygiene ratings for restaurants, hotels and cafeterias.
In a related development, FSSAI’s “clean street food hubs” under which it identified clusters including street vendors, and trained and mobilised them, is being scaled up nationally from 20 such hubs presently. Besides, milk testing and inspection of dairy plants will come into effect starting this month, with penalties for those not adhering to guidelines.
“There is general despair among citizens that food products such as milk, spices and oil are adulterated. We understand there are problems and that’s why we are doing largescale surveillance to understand the nature and extent of the problem so we can address those,” he said. The regulator is hiring 800-plus employees and taking over central licensing enforcement from state governments.
FSSAI brings loose milk suppliers in Gujarat under regulatory ambit: Report
A nationwide introduction of a similar scheme will be taken into consideration by the FSSAI based on the experience of the rollout in Gujarat.
Unorganised milk suppliers, vendors and producers will now come under the ambit of a regulatory net with the launch of the Food Safety and Standard Authority of India's new 'Verified Milk Vendors Scheme' in Gujarat.
All such unorganised milk producers and vendors will be issued identity cards on registration under the new scheme, The Hindu Businesslinereports.
The state has an estimated 40 lakh milk producers and vendors.
A nationwide introduction of a similar scheme will be taken into consideration based on the experience of the rollout in Gujarat.
Currently, only cooperative dairies and registered private dairies come under the regulatory franework in accordance with the Food Safety and Standards ACt. However, small vendors and producers continue to operate outside the ambit of such regulations.Hemant G Koshia, Commissioner, Food and Drug Control Administration (FDCA) - Gujarat, told the publication that the plan for rollout of the scheme is still underway and they expect that all vendors will be given identity cards within the next six months to one year.
FSSAI launches 'Verified Milk Vendor Scheme' in Gujarat
FSSAI to bring loose milk suppliers under the regulatory ambit
In a first for India, the unorganised milk suppliers or vendors will now be brought under the monitoring through a verification programme.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has launched 'Verified Milk Vendors Scheme' in Gujarat with an aim to cover milk producers and milk vendors under the regulation net.
Under the new scheme, all the unorganised milk producers and vendors in Gujarat will be issued identity cards by taking their registration. "For the first time, we will be monitoring the raw and loose milk suppliers. Till now the focus has remained on the dairy products and the dairies. But the unorganised suppliers to these private dairies and the end-consumers were somehow missed from the regulatory monitoring. So, we are going a step ahead to keep a check on the raw milk suppliers and producers, who independently supply loose milk to small/big dairies and the end consumers," Hemant G Koshia, Commissioner, Food and Drug Control Administration (FDCA) - Gujarat, told Businessline.
The cooperative dairies and registered private dairies are already covered under the Food Safety and Standards Act, whereas the small vendors and producers often go unchecked.
Gujarat is estimated to have about 40 lakh milk producers and vendors who will be given these identity cards.
FSSAI Chief Executive Officer, Pawan Kumar Agarwal was also present during the launch of the scheme in Ahmedabad last week.
"Currently, we are finalising the rollout plan and coverage strategy. Within next six months to one year's time we will cover all the vendors with identity cards," Koshia stated.
Based on the Gujarat experience, the FSSAI will plan to roll-out the similar scheme nationwide.
On the retail consumption of loose milk, Koshia stated that about 85 per cent of the overall milk consumption in Gujarat is pouched milk, so only a small portion of retail consumers actually go for loose milk purchases. However, Koshia also flagged the risk at the private dairies, where a bulk of loose milk gets processed to make different milk products.
The food regulators in Gujarat have observed instances of milk adulteration in the State to be around 6-7 per cent of the samples collected. "This is in line with the national average of milk adulteration cases. In past 8-10 years, we have seen adulteration cases where water or sucrose were mixed with milk. But there has been no case of urea-mixed adulteration at least in Gujarat so far," stated Koshia.
New sensor to test milk
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG) have developed a simple paper-based sensor to assess the freshness of milk, and the method is instantaneous. Commonly used tests to study the effectiveness of pasteurisation such as the Methylene Blue Dye Reduction Test are time-consuming. It can take hours for the colour changes that indicate the presence or absence of microbes to occur. Commercial phenol-based tests require sophisticated spectrophotometers and involve multi-step procedures.
A research team led by Pranjal Chandra of the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering at IITG developed a simple visual detection technique to detect the quality of milk without the need for special equipment or instruments. Their work was recently published in the journal “Biosensors and Bioelectronics”.
Alkaline phosphatase (ALP), an enzyme present in raw milk, is destroyed at high pasteurisation temperature and is therefore an important biomarker in the quality control of milk. Detection of ALP in milk can thus point to inadequate pasteurisation and/or contamination with raw milk. According to Pranjal Chandra, despite ALP’s recognisable detection potential in native milk, the multi-step nature of and the requirement of sophisticated bulky analytical instruments and trained personnel to detect ALP with the currently used methods limit their use as a sensor of milk quality in remote settings and in home kitchens. Such testing, he pointed out, would require easy-to-operate portable detection kits.
The researchers took simple filter paper, chemically modified it and loaded it with the anti-ALP compound 5-bromo-4-chloro-3-indolyl phosphate, which captures the ALP present in the milk by forming a blue-green precipitate. The intensity of the colour indicates the amount of ALP present. In the absence of ALP, there will be no colouration. The team used a smartphone to capture the image of the colour and used the RGB (Red Green Blue) filter in the phone to profile the colour obtained, which could be correlated to the ALP concentration in the test sample.
“Our sensor takes merely 13 minutes to detect ALP, and hence it can be applied for quick onsite analysis,” Pranjal Chandra said. The researchers successfully tested milk obtained from villages and commercially available milk samples using their kit and found that they could detect down to 0.87 units of ALP per millilitre of milk to 91-100 per cent accuracy. This detection limit and accuracy make it possible to discriminate raw milk from pasteurised/boiled milk. The team has developed a miniaturised detection kit. Kuldeep Mahato, Ashutosh Kumar and Buddhadev Purohit of the research team have also developed an advanced version of the paper-based sensor with improved accuracy using a label-free bioelectronic chip. The researchers plan to commercialise both variants of the kit.
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