Akshaya Patra on World Health Day 2015

World Health Day is an initiative of World Health Organisation (WHO) to spread awareness and counter issues on various aspects related to health with a theme specific to the year. The rising threats posed by unsafe handling of food and the need for coordinated action throughout the food supply chain to mitigate foodborne diseases have made food safety the theme for World Health Day 2015. Under the slogan ‘From farm to plate, make food safe’ World Health Day 2015 will highlight the opportunities and challenges associated with food safety.

The World Health Day’s theme of food safety is closely related to The Akshaya Patra Foundation’s operational process. Akshaya Patra provides mid-day meal to more than 1.4 million children at Government schools. While preparing meal for so many children, Akshaya Patra follows a strict and mandatory kitchen process to maintain quality and hygiene of the prepared mid-day meals. Food Safety Management System is employed in all the kitchens to handle, prepare and deliver food to prevent food borne illness. 11 Centralised Kitchens are already ISO 22000:2005 certified and the remaining are in the process of certification. 

The entire food safety management of Akshaya Patra kitchen can be categorised as pre-production, production and post-production stages.  A high standard of personal hygiene is the first step towards food safety and prevention of food borne illnesses. Hence every Akshaya Patra kitchen staff follows a routine hygiene chart along with protective gears. Quality check is done during procurement of raw materials. There is a process to store and issue raw materials like FIFO (First In First Out) and FEFO (First Expiry First Out). Quality and safety is maintained during cooking like using vessels made of Stainless Steel of 304 grade checking and recording of Critical Control Points (CCPs) like cooking temperature at periodic intervals to avoid undercooking or overcooking of the meal. Batch wise Food Quality Check is done by Quality Officers in each kitchen. The cooked food is packed in steam sterilised vessels and transported through sterilised and customised transport vehicles to retain freshness of the cooked food. Methods like logistic charting and GPRS are gradually being adopted and implemented in the kitchens.

Collection of feedback from school and acting upon it, circulation of Dos and Don’ts to all schools on a periodical basis for creating awareness on food safety and hygiene while serving the mid-day meals, audits and reviews on a periodical manner along with adopting continual improvement methodologies like Kaizen, CI Projects and Six Sigma are part of post-production processes.

Akshaya Patra is glad to have been already serving millions of children with clean, hygienic and nutritious meal.

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