Global brands stretched by India’s food safety record
AT A MCDONALD’S plant outside Mumbai, 200 workers walk through air dryers and disinfectant pools, then get to work making the day’s 25 000 patties from chicken painstakingly sourced in a country with one of the world’s worst food safety records.
To safeguard
its multibil- lion-dollar brand, McDonald’s says more than 100 checks it applies across its international operations are then carried out after that.
India’s tainted water, patchy cold storage network and a retail sector made up of tiny local grocers present a major risk for international food brands, whose reputation can suffer globally from one local slip.
This can mean educating hundreds of small, often illiter- ate, farmers – critical in a fragmented farming sector that in some cases still uses “night soil”, or human faeces, for composting.
“There are thousands of farmers you need to reach out to, each with maybe an acre, two acres of land,” said Vikram Ogale, who looks after the supply chain and quality assurance for McDonald’s India.
“Think of a situation where you have 1 000 farmers and… you have to educate them, convince them.” But even that is sometimes not enough.
Swiss food group Nestlé is currently battling India’s biggest food scare in a decade and an unprecedented branding crisis in the country, after regulators reported some packets of its noodles contained excess lead, a finding the company disputes. Its woes have laid bare the risks of operating in a country where it is difficult to build chain.
Nestlé, like other major brands conscious of the damage a food scare can create, says it carries out extensive testing and manages parts of its procurement processes electronically so ingredients, milk for example, are tagged and traceable. It steam sterilises spices and transports edible oil in stainless steel tankers to avoid metal contamination.
a
watertight
supply
Wal-Mart, which operates as a wholesaler in India, says its checks mean rejecting 10 to 11 percent of produce daily.
While all major international firms producing packaged food or fast food say they use trusted suppliers, most acknowledge their suppliers often rely on other providers, who then sub-contract to others and so on, making it a daily struggle to control the source of every last ingredient. – Reuters “Austerity must end,” government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis said after Greek negotiators ended a separate meeting on Saturday with Tsipras. “A different Europe is necessary, a different Europe is possible.”
With markets closed, the weekend gives negotiators some room to lay out a roadmap for what will be a high-stakes week with an emergency summit of EU chiefs today in Brussels.
The clock is running down on a June 30 deadline to make payments and work out a new deal amid disagreements on pensions, sales tax and spending targets.
Greece’s government remains defiant on some key issues. Minister of state Nikos Pappas, in an interview with Ethnos newspaper published on Saturday, said red-lines include no cuts to pension plans and wages, and a comprehensive review of the country’s onerous debt load.
Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, in opinion pieces for The Irish Times and Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, blamed his European counterparts for their unwillingness to consider Greece’s proposals.
He warned of the rise of neo-Nazism if the country defaults and exits the euro, while expressing optimism that differences will be overcome.
With its finances in tatters and banks bleeding deposits at record pace, it’s unclear how long Greece can hold out against the conditions attached to a fresh infusion of rescue loans. – Bloomberg