Wade through the busy road leading to Azadpur Mandi in the Capital, Asia's largest wholesale market for fruits and vegetables, and you will see different varieties being sold by the roadside. Also for sale are food products such as ketchup, pickles, spices, dry fruits, jaggery, pasta, syrups, herbs and edible oil — all in loose form. Flies, dirt and sweat complete the picture of this wholesale market where trucks can be seen entering every now and then.
Bang opposite the mandi is Bharat Test House (BTH), one of the 82 labs (most of them private) accredited by National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) and notified by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), the country's apex food regulator.
Enter the small building and you will likely bump into KK Juneja, head of the food division at BTH. Talk about the Maggi controversy —and food safety — and the burly man with 50 years of experience in food testing opens up. "The Maggi revelations have woken up the masses but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of products are available in loose form, which are toxic and need quality checks," says Juneja, pointing towards the mandi.
The ban on Maggi and several other instant noodle brands in India since last month over the allegedly excessive levels of lead and the presence of monosodium glutamate (MSG) has been good for labs like BTH and the one Verghese Chacko runs in Rajajinagar in Bengaluru. "We got more than 100 noodle samples for testing of lead, just after the Maggi controversy," says the chief executive of Bangalore Test House.
The FSSAI on June 5 asked Nestle to recall all nine approved variants of Maggi and to remove the 'no added MSG' labelling on the Maggi packet since it was misleading.
After Nestle recalled Maggi, other instant noodle brands like Top Ramen and Ching's have gone off shelves too, following orders from the FSSAI or state governments. The FSSAI also asked Nestle to withdraw Maggi Oats Masala Noodles as approval for the same had not been granted.
Legal Rap
The companies have slammed FSSAI for not giving them a chance to respond and said 'no added MSG' is technically correct since it was not separately added as a taste enhancer. "It is a known fact that it is not possible to distinguish between naturally occurring glutamate and added glutamate in foods," FSSAI quoted Nestle as saying in its June 5 order. Nestle has recalled Maggi worth `320 crore from the market. Neither FSSAI CEO Yudhvir Singh Malik nor Nestle, which on Friday replaced its India head, responded to ET Magazine's emails.
Nestle has taken the issue to the Bombay High Court where it is being heard.
The company has said the labs where the Maggi samples were tested are not NABLaccredited to test the product for lead.
The FSSAI lawyer reportedly responded that labs can conduct tests without the NABL accreditation if they are recognized by the regulator. "I have no reason to not trust accredited labs," says a senior FSSAI official who did not want to be named.
This week the court came down strongly on the FSSAI, asking why a showcause notice was not issued to Nestle; why all nine variants were banned when only three variants were tested; and why only Maggi was chosen for testing and not other noodle brands. The FSSAI's lawyer argued that the body had the powers to issue a recall order without issuing a showcause notice, but said the FSSAI would now give the company a hearing. Interestingly, Singapore and Britain have declared made-in-India Maggi, which they import, to be safe.
Jignesh Parikh, quality control manager at RCA Laboratories in Mumbai, says there have been several enquiries from companies to have their products tested for MSG. "But we have turned them down because there are no guidelines for testing MSG." The lack of clarity or the absence of guidelines about certain ingredients in foods and what they contain, according to many, is one of the many problems plaguing food safety in India.
The problem is made all the more seri-ous by the fact that the size of the food processing industry in India is $180 billion and that the sector accounts for an eighth of India's exports. "With the increase in industrialised production of chicken and aquaculture, we need to develop standards to test antibiotic residues in chicken and fish.
We currently have those only for a few antibiotics in fish," says Amit Khurana, head, food safety and toxins, at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).
There are other standards like front-of-pack labelling, a standardised product recall process, regulation of junk food to children and related advertising and nutrition labelling in restaurants which are increasingly the norm in the US and Europe, but not in India. "In Europe they have gone from parts per million (a metric to measure contaminants) to parts per billion," says G Padmanabhan, who heads the research council at the Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI).
The 28-country European Union is considered to have the highest food standards globally. It comprises seven out of the top countries on the food safety parameter of The Economist Intelligence Unit's 2015 Global Food Security Index. The US ranks third and India a lowly 79th out of 109 countries, with Bangladesh being its only South Asian neighbour placed even lower on the list.
Moreover, a 2013 study by Food Sentry, a consultancy, of 3,400 products in violation of standards exported by 117 countries found that India was the source for 11.1% of those products, more than any other country. The Food and Drug Administration, the US's food regulator, has 54 import alerts for products from India, the fourth highest, with China topping the list at 79. In 2008, China faced one of its worst public health scares with nearly three lakh kids falling sick after consuming milk powder reportedly contaminated with a toxic industrial compound called melamine.
Food Inspections
Europe has in the recent past banned the import of poultry products and mangoes from India, decisions which were subsequently reversed after assurances from India (see Foreign Trade Wall).
Scott Witt, vice president, analysis and production, Food Sentry, says the US's performance is not much better than India, given that the US ranked fifth in Food Sentry's study of countries with the most violations. "The US inspects less than 2% of its imported food, the EU somewhat more. But, companies importing to the US must meet strict FDA standards. For example, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) plans are required in all cases." (HACCP is a management system in which food safety is addressed through the analysis and control of biological, chemical, and physical hazards from raw material production, procurement and handling, to manufacturing, distribution and consumption of the finished product.)
Till the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, India had a bunch of different food safety-related regulations, none of them comprehensive.
These included the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954, Food Product Order, 1955 and Edible Oils Packaging (Regulations) Order, 1988, all of which the Food Safety Act replaced. While the FSSAI was established in 2008, the Food Safety Act came into effect only in August 2011.
Ajay Gupta, managing director of Capital Foods, which owns the Ching's and Smith & Jones brands, says it is not fair to compare India's food standards with the US's or Europe's: "It's like comparing a four-year-old baby with a 40-yearold man." RS Sodhi, managing director of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), which owns the Amul brand, says companies have to ensure quality checks at the time of sourcing their products. "We have bulk milk coolers at our collection centres to reduce the bacterial count in our milk. Weinvest `8-10 lakh on each cooler. A private dairy company with multiple suppliers may not be able to do that."
While companies say that Indian standards are fine on paper, there needs to be better scrutiny by the FSSAI and NABL. "Many labs are not very well-equipped. That could be an area of concern. The FSSAI should have a panel of about 100 scientists who can ensure whether the equipments in labs are properly calibrated and the manpower is well-trained," says BK Rao, group product manager at biscuits maker Parle Products.
Satya Prakash, a former director of the Central Food Laboratory in Kolkata, found in a study that the standards in the Food Safety Act were the same as in the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, just renamed.
"He also referred to the manpower shortage in state-owned labs like the Central Food Labora-tory in Kolkata: "There has been no offer to analyse the samples since 2010 because all seven sanctioned posts are lying vacant," he told the CSE's Environment Health Bulletin in 2012. About the Central Food Lab in Sonauli in Uttar Pradesh, he said, "Time to time, staff is posted from Ghaziabad to run the laboratory on an ad hoc basis and though regular posts were created in the year 2008, none have been filled so far."
Testing Standards Bangalore Test House's Chacko says the accreditation process for labs is rigorous, transparent and expensive, and the labs are recertified every second year after accreditation.
"Many labs also claim to be NABL-accredited when they have actually been accredited only for a few parameters. The entire scope has to be covered but then nobody is checking," he adds.
The four-storeyed lab, which got its accreditation 13 years ago, tests samples of processed foods, raw material, ayurvedic herbal drugs, water, soil and pharmaceutical products and has one of the country's largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies as its client. The lab has 65 chemists on its rolls, and costs `35 lakh a year to maintain.
India's food testing standards as laid down by FSSAI are on a par with those in the US, feels Chacko. But the difference is food testing here is not mandatory for every batch. "After you get FSSAI approval, the certificate and number, it's a free for all. They don't come back till it has to be renewed, though they should ideally carry out tests throughout the year."
But the expense, rather than the lack of labs, will be a hurdle, particularly for smaller players, he points out. "Each test costs between `10,000 and `15,000 and various tests are prescribed. How will a small player be able to afford this?" The number and kind of tests vary according to the product: for whole coriander, to take one example, FSSAI prescribes eight different tests, apart from those for identifying the presence of heavy metals.
"Every food manufacturing facility has to have a quality control lab for an internal quality check. In the next stage, the product is sent to a third-party independent testing lab. After following the due procedure, we either certify that the product is free from any toxic substance or we reject the product," says Juneja.
He adds that the operative cost of each instrument is very high and that the government must offer financial assistance for the upkeep and upgrade of the lab. "For example if we buy an instrument that costs a crore and we receive only a handful of samples from companies, how will we cover the costs," asks Vaibhav Gupta, deputy chief executive, BTH, which tests wholesale spices, edible oils, tea and coffee, jaggery, sugar, syrups and juices.
Conflict of Interest
The bigger issue is the conflict of interest in labs being paid by companies whose products they test and certify. Since the labs expect more business from companies, they may go soft on violations in the companies' products. The labs and companies we spoke to, not surprisingly, deny this.
But as Michael Moss, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times journalist and author of Salt Sugar Fat:
How the Food Giants Hooked Us says, it is in the companies' own interest to ensure no corners are cut: "There are some food companies that go to great lengths to test their foods, believing that testing not only will help prevent them from getting caught up in a bad food scandal, but will also help them monitor their supplies and make improvements when contamination is found."
Other than processed foods, experts bemoan the lack of stringent standards for restaurants, roadside eateries and organic foods. "Look at this new wave of organic food. Shelves are filled with such products in most of the hypermarkets. My worry is, if they are so much in supply, how come we do not receive a single such product for testing and ascertaining that they are indeed organic? Consumers need to keep their eyes and ears open," adds Juneja.
In a country where taste is primal, health matters take a back seat usually and take centre stage only when there's some big expose. "Millions of controversies around food safety happened in the past too but no one talks of them (now). The mixing of argemone oil (a source of sanguinarine, a toxic quaternary ammonium salt) in mustard oil is one, the presence of high level of nickel (toxic to the body in all but trace amounts) in a leading chocolate brand is another. I wonder how long will people remember the Maggi controversy and the need for food safety," says Juneja.
Whether or not people remember the current crisis for long, this is a wake-up call as good — and as grave — as any for both the government and companies to substantially raise the bar on food standards. This is essential to prevent a public health scandal and restore the trust of the public in the foods they would otherwise buy without even a thought.
