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Food safety training ecosystem crosses 1,00,000-trained supervisor mark
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Friday, 08 February, 2019, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Ashwani Maindola, New Delhi
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The training and capacity-building ecosystem for promoting food safety and hygiene in India has achieved an important milestone today, crossing a mark of 1,00,000 trained and certified supervisors through 3,500 training sessions conducted so far in the last 20 months since its inception in July 2017.
This was said by FSSAI, the country’s apex food regulator, in a statement here on Thursday.
The Food Safety Training and Certification (FoSTaC) is a programme initiated by FSSAI aimed at building capacities of food handlers across the food value chain, including micro-, small, medium and large-scale enterprises in the food sector.
The statement said, “FoSTaC has created a ripple effect with a pan-India training network. It comprises 169 training partners and over 1,500 empanelled master trainers, who conduct training programmes across three levels of courses (basic, advanced and special) in a cascading model.”
With 17 courses across the levels, the FoSTaC training programme stipulates that food business operators (FBOs) are required to have at least one trained and certified food safety supervisor for every 25 food handlers, or a part thereof, in each of their premises.
The FoSTaC programme runs through an online portal that manages all kinds of training programmes end-to-end through the effective delivery of the entire course module by trained subject matter experts in association with training partners empanelled with FSSAI.
Under the FoSTaC programme, over 80,000 people have been trained in the organised sector and almost 18,000 people in the unorganised sector, including street food vendors and self-help groups (SHGs), till date.
Pawan Kumar Agarwal, chief executive officer, FSSAI, said, “FoSTaC has proved that food safety is a shared responsibility that aims to promote a culture of self-compliance in food businesses by making them more diligent towards food safety and hygiene in their premises through effective training and capacity-building of their own staff.”
He added that the success of this initiative lies on the power of partnership between stakeholders across the value chain and convergence towards enabling than policing as licensing and enforcement alone does not ensure food is safe for consumption.
Such an ecosystem will pave a way towards creating a sustainable model that can be replicated by other similar geographies across the globe.
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