So finally what was being talked about for quite some time should start happening! The new FSSAI CEO Arun Singhal after taking over the charge has laid the roadmap of action. He desires to put in place a new set of protocols pertaining to milk, honey, meat & poultry and edible oils for focused quality testing.
For Aatmnirbhar Bharat, creating benchmarks of quality and testing and also putting in place protocols for rapid testing at subsequent stages of the value chain is going to be the game changer. It is the quality testing and checks which would facilitate in establishing Brand India across the world.
These five products are under the spotlight on account of the levels of rampant adulteration observed in them all across the country. Expanding the outreach of testing apparatus, FSSAI plans to introduce third party audits, time bound inspections and introducing precision testing. These new normals are the demand of the time post-COVID for the food industry.
FSSAI would also be focusing on changing the present norms pertaining to Import of Food in India to provide greater access. If one were to read between the lines about this policy pronouncement, it would create an environment for ushering in an era of new quality and testing norms. It may not come from the government immediately but by opening the market for more import of food items, a nudge so to say, which adhere to norms of testing and quality checks from the country of respective origins, the Indian players per force would have to start adopting the quality and testing norms.
AgNext, a globally acclaimed AgriTech company, who have been advocating about creating new norms of quality and testing through Artificial Intelligence, laying down a new set of protocols is a positive development. AgNext has been a category innovator in itself, providing a technology platform called Qualix for rapid commodity assessment solutions across procurement, trade, production, storage and consumption of food and Agri value chains. The Qualix AI engine uses spectrometry, computer vision and IoT Sensing solutions, delivered through an integrated hardware and software interface for accurate and instant quality analysis. Leveraging on this, AgNext is introducing a stream of other SaaS-based solutions on its Qualix platform which will benefit its clients for integrating more technology solutions for their benefits.
When the push comes from the government its outreach becomes quite manifest. Post COVID times when testing has come into the day to day lexicon of the common citizen of the country, the word- testing needs to be elevated to a new proposition of making a norm for the food industry per se. Testing should be the new normal and technology also needs to take the step forward further by bringing in improvisations so that the paradigm of testing shifts from the producers and manufacturers to the end users or the customers.
