Challenges food companies face to bring quality food to your table
French major Danone Foods & Beverages India complains that it cannot source nearly 90 per cent of the milk its competition sources in the country. The reason: quality.
To keep a tight quality check, the food company works with select suppliers, besides engaging in direct distribution – where it transports products from its factories to kirana stores in its own trucks. From dairy to coffee and sauces to poultry products, the variety of food making it to your table from international food companies and retailers is only increasing. And so the concern over locally-sourced ingredients that need to be, for instance, hygienic, free of microbes and within permissible limits of heavy metal or pesticide residue.
Sourcing woes
Local food majors see the sourcing problem quite differently. Ensuring consistent food quality has more to do with the effective management of the supply chain, they say. Especially since farms may be smaller and more scattered in India than in international practice. In fact, decentralised small farms have their advantages, they add, in terms of the mass use of chemicals and antibiotics in food products.
In the dairy context, Danone India-head, Jochen Ebert, in an earlier interaction, said that sourcing was expensive and challenging, but unavoidable, given their rigid standards for milk sourcing and supply chain management. Tough standards become critical, since the quality of food directly affects consumers’ health. Unacceptable residues in a final product consumed everyday could lead to health concerns.
Companies are keen to plug all quality loopholes. Swiss food major Nestle India, for instance, has been working with local dairy farmers since 1961, offering them training and technical assistance to improve the quality of milk. Across Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, they also support sustainable farming practices.
Nestle works with over one lakh milk farmers collecting about 300 million kilograms of milk every year. RS Sodhi, Managing Director, Gujarat Milk Marketing Co-operative Federation, which owns the hugely popular Amul, observes that scattered milk production is the challenge that international companies grapple with in India. It takes time and investments to build this supply chain, besides familiarising themselves with the practice of collecting milk from millions of farmers.
Unlike the western world, where a farmer has 400-500 buffaloes on an average, an Indian farmer owns just one or two buffaloes. Chandra Bhushan, Deputy Director General with the Centre for Science and Environment, says that the decentralised milk production model followed in India has distinct advantages.
There is less chemical use in this model, compared to controlled cattle farms. “For example, the poultry industry in India follows the European model and the quality issues are the same. High amounts of antibiotics are found in chicken in the US as well as here,” he alleges, even as local industry contests that observation.
Scale-up safety
But since the Indian consumer is not one that can be ignored, retail-majors like Walmart India are working with small and developing businesses on food safety.
A key strategy involves reducing risk early in the food supply chain, using a scalable approach to food safety. This allows them to asses their basic and intermediate levels of food safety against established benchmarks, as they grow.
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