India’s food safety rules are giving restaurants heartburn: It’s the process, not just the product

Restaurants are getting heartburn due to food safety law. Most are not selling fake milk. They are failing on how they prepare their food. Many cannot understand why it is an offence when the food that they prepare is fine. Part of the answer lies in our collective habits and reflexes.

Food Safety and Standards Act (FSSA) 2006, implemented in 2011, supersedes the earlier Prevention of Food Adulteration Act (PFA) 1954. One massive difference is that the new Act also focuses on food preparation, and not just on the quality of the final food. While the old Act predominantly obsessed about determining whether the food was adulterated or not by testing for it, the new Act governs the steps in food preparation and prescribes guidelines to prevent possible adulteration.

So, there are requirements for kitchen cleanliness, segregation of ingredients, utensils and workspaces to prevent contamination and mix-ups, and for checking up on vendors. Such focus on preparation practices ensures that risk of contamination is lowered. The philosophy is that if the steps that go into food preparation are 'correct', then the final preparation will be 'automatically' adulterant-free. And, conversely - and this is the logic that is causing the recent non-compliances - incorrect procedures raise the risk of adulterated product. Thus, issues will ultimately, if not immediately, propagate into the product.


This is novel for India's food preparation industry. It is struggling to comprehend that there will be instances in which the food quality can pass even as food preparation techniques are improper - and that this is a problem. The older paradigm ignored such procedural flaws since the product was 'fine'. Thus, an industry 'trained' for many years by the older legal framework is now unable to rewire itself to fix something, even if the 'harm' has not yet happened.

As an example, cooking vessels can get exposed to contamination due to improper storage. Subsequent steps, however, involve vessel cleaning and rinsing before use. Our first reflex is to think that this cleaning will remove all the prior contaminants and, therefore, improper storage is not viewed as a lapse.

The law, however, sees this as a gap and a violation. Remember in the older days, waiters would bring multiple glasses of water in one hand by holding each glass with a finger thrust inside the glass? Presumably, in the older paradigm, handwashing would be an acceptable risk-mitigation.

The pharmaceutical industry recently saw a revision of its governing laws - revised Schedule M. It's also heavily focused on maintaining vigil on the manufacturing steps in addition to checking the final quality of product. Similar to the pain experienced by restaurants, the initial days of this law's implementation were challenging for many pharma companies.

The issue isn't limited to the restaurants' - or pharma companies' - motivation (or lack thereof) to comply. As a population, our first instinct is not about the process (about minimising risk by correcting the process). At home, 'risk' is not the first thought for any individual. So, he or she might ignore replacing the gas cylinder pipe till it cracks. But, at work, as an employee, the same person is expected to take a 'process-first' view. A switch to a different default thinking mode doesn't happen voluntarily. A forcing mechanism is required.

Regulation alone cannot provide this mechanism. It sets standards but does nothing to skill the team, or make it easy for them to identify gaps. There are many paths to 'process-first'.

The West was an early adopter. Although, even there, safety and quality crises were required for regulatory action. For example, health scares from poison-laced drugs in 1937, and antibiotics contaminated with phenobarbital in 1941, caused the abrupt evolution of US drug laws. Japan was late on this journey but, eventually, mastered these concepts, even teaching some of them back to the West.

So, elements in addition to regulations are necessary. Product liability, insurance that can price risks to products from process deficiencies, legal framework to settle liabilities, and skill-building programmes are some examples. It's vital that customers also celebrate the resulting high quality and be willing to pay more.

The menu has many ingredients, and the recipe will be different for each industry, pharma exports being a stand-out success. Other industries should design their own. But changing the instinctual habit - to think about process before product - should be on 'Today's Specials' for all.