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Your favourite mall food court may not be as safe as you think
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Saturday, 22 August, 2026, 16 : 00 PM [IST]
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Ashwin Bhadri
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The increased scrutiny of restaurants and cafés operating inside shopping malls is a welcome development, particularly at a time when food-safety enforcement is becoming more visible across the country. Malls are no longer just landlords for food businesses. From a consumer's perspective, the mall itself becomes part of the dining experience and, consequently, part of the trust equation. When a food outlet operating inside a mall faces a hygiene violation, consumers often associate that failure with the larger premises as well.
Food safety cannot be treated as a one-time inspection exercise. A restaurant may pass an inspection today and still develop gaps in hygiene, storage, pest control or temperature management tomorrow. What malls need is a system of continuous monitoring and compliance rather than periodic checks.
The responsibility, however, cannot rest entirely with mall operators. Restaurant brands and individual outlets must remain accountable for their own food-safety practices. Malls can create a strong compliance ecosystem by making food-safety standards a part of tenant management, regular audits, documentation and corrective-action processes.
One of the biggest areas of concern is the gap between having documented SOPs and actually following them on the ground. Food handlers need regular training, kitchen hygiene needs to be monitored, cold-chain and storage temperatures need to be maintained, pest-control measures need to be documented and cleaning schedules need to be followed consistently.
Malls can play a powerful role by creating a common food-safety framework for all F&B tenants. This could include periodic audits, mandatory food-handler training, pest-control verification, water and surface testing where relevant, temperature monitoring and immediate corrective action for non-compliances.
Technology can further strengthen this ecosystem. Digital audit trails, temperature monitoring, complaint tracking and compliance dashboards can help mall management identify recurring risks instead of waiting for a regulatory inspection or consumer complaint.
The larger objective should not be to create a culture of fear among food businesses. Regulatory scrutiny works best when it encourages prevention rather than simply punishment. For the industry, the message should be very clear: compliance is not paperwork. It is an operational discipline. The strongest food-safety culture is one where a business identifies a potential risk and fixes it before it becomes a consumer complaint or a regulatory violation.
Ultimately, the increasing involvement of malls in food-safety oversight could be a positive shift for India's growing organised food-service ecosystem. The next step is to move from sporadic checks to a structured, measurable and transparent system where the mall, the food operator and the regulator each have clearly defined responsibilities. Consumer trust is ultimately built in the kitchen not in the inspection room.
(The author is founder & CEO at Equinox Labs)
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