Coca-Cola India along with FSSAI will train 50,000 street food vendors over the next three years in food safety, hygiene and waste management, according to reports.
Pawan Kumar Agarwal, Chief Executive Officer of Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) and the local unit of American beverages company Coca-Cola Co. formally signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) whereby Coca-Cola India, the first corporate partner supporting FSSAI’s project ‘Clean Street Food’. The project aims to raise the safety standards of food sold on streets across the country.
The training module under the project will focus on the owners and employers at small food service outlets and street food vendors, mostly in the unorganized sector, to understand the basic tenets (and the science behind) storage of food items and maintaining hygiene.
Coca-Cola will be responsible for the program execution through its network of trainers and available infrastructure while FSSAI will ensure the relevance of the training content and shall monitor the overall delivery.
The partnership will help accelerate Hon’ble Prime Minister’s vision for Skill India which aims to train over 40 crore (400 million) people in India in different skills by 2022. Nestle India Ltd, the local arm of the Swiss packaged food company whose single-largest revenue earner Maggi instant noodles was banned by FSSAI in 2015 for about six months on safety concerns, has recently worked with the regulator to train 700 street food vendors in Goa.
FSSAI is also working with companies like ITC Ltd, Mondelez India, TetraPak, Jubilant FoodWorks, Yum Brands, among others, for different projects related to nutrition and food safety.
