TUV India Pvt. Ltd, one of the leading service providers for food safety, ethical inspection, certification, and training services, inaugurated the TUV Nord House, a facility housing a state-of-the-art laboratory, research centre and office, in Pune recently.
The facility boasts of some of the world's most advanced analytical equipment for food safety. The groundwork for the new laboratory and research centre commenced in 2010 and was completed in just 18 months.
When asked why Pune was chosen as the location, Anil Rairikar, MD, TUV India, said, “Pune is an education and research hub for agriculture and the food and pharma industries. Thus, getting manpower with the requisite expertise and technical analysts is easy for them.”
“Various agriculture and food-related companies, associations and boards are based in Pune. This allows us to provide them services at their doorsteps. Moreover, spacious open spaces covering about 20,000 sq ft are available only in Pune and not in Mumbai,” he said.
V K Gupta, GM, laboratory operations, TUV India Pvt. Ltd, said, “The main concern for food safety is firstly adhering to the FSSAI regulations pertaining to adulteration, micro-biological changes and use of chemicals and pesticides.”
TUV's lab is well-equipped to make testing in regards to food safety concerns. For example, people use metals and other extraneous material as adulterants. TUV uses CP-MS to detect any minute particle of metal in the food and ICP-OES to detect the percentage of metal present in it.
Basmati rice is another example. Every brand claims to be the most aromatic because of the chemicals present in it. TUV has a machine that detects which chemical is used to produce a particular aroma, and another to detect the percentage of chemical used for aroma.
TUV India – one of the oldest and largest service providers for ISO certifications, inspection services, training courses, validation and verification of carbon mitigation projects (CDM) and testing and certification of consumer and industrial products – started operations in 1989.
Guido Rettig, chairman, TUV Nord Gruppe, spoke about the advent of the Indian food safety revolution and vowed to support local industry and regulators to meet global standards. Despite being a leading food producer, India presently processes only 3-4 per cent of its total output.
A large portion of the food produced is wasted, due to the lack of adequate infrastructure like cold storage and supply logistics. As such, there remains a tremendous opportunity for India to fulfill its food security requirements.
With India emerging as a major global economy, there is an increasing awareness and curiosity about Indian products, and large Indian diaspora spread across the world gives it a huge latent opportunity to become a major sourcing hub for various products and ethnic food items.
Rairikar said, “With the implementation of the Food Safety and Standards Act (FSSA), 2006, Indian industry needs the services of accredited third-party testing laboratories more than ever before.”
“Globally, food safety concerns go much beyond routine quality testing, and products are now tested for safety aspects like pesticide residues, toxins, dioxins, antibiotic & hormone residues etc., which require very sophisticated capabilities,” he said.
“TUV India is confident of fulfilling this need through its NABL, APEDA, FSSAI and AGMARK- approved laboratory. The laboratory will also be seeking EIC, BIS, FDA and German QS approvals, amongst others, which would help us to boost our economy with an increase in the export,” he added.
