FSSAI part deux: yesterday i explained how idiotic some parts of this Organisation were but like many things there are 2 sides to every story: prior to this law being implemented fly by night operators could import food stuff into india with minimal checks including if the food was safe. All they had to do was slap on a label in a corner with basic information on price green or red dot and name of importer. This started getting misused where importers and some cases reputable companies would buy large stocks of product that were going of supermarket shelves across the globe as they were nearing their expiry date. These were shipped en mass to free trade zone areas in The middle east and Asia, dates changed on them and then shipped to south Asia and Africa. To elaborate say for example x cream cheese with a 4 month shelf life is removed from a USA super market at 25% and from a discount store at 75% reduced shelf life. This is then sold to whole salers at 15 cents on the dollar who ship it to a free trade zone, scratch of the date of manufacture and re print on it and then stick the basic label. Often time raw materials such as GMO ingredients (other banned ingrdients including beef) were also being scratched off. These products were finding their way into stores in India........and still are. All the FSSAI said was labels not permitted and the entire label of the product should reflect Indian label standards ( which are very reasonable and acceptable) and every product needs a manufacturer spec sheet and will be tested for same parameters. The problem for the importer is now to go to the original manufacturer and ask him to design and comply and buy from him genuine product and use proper channels to import. Large brands will refuse if they are not present in India (philly cheese as an example) and smaller brands would sell at higher prices and insist on minimum quantity runs. There went the margin of the small time importer......a lot of 3000 containers are due to this so lets not blame FSSAI completely but yes genuine importers are suffering due the sins of quite a few bad apples. On a positive side Oreo cookies gained such popularity via the smuggled route that kraft decided to manufacture in India and killed the re labelled import route which was routed via Singapore!
Posted on: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 03:37:54 +0000
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