Tea Estates join Eat Right Campus certification program

In alignment with the Eat Right India vision, 11 Tea Estates from the North East region have now joined the Eat Right Campus Certification Program. A felicitation ceremony was organized by the FSSAI Eastern and North Eastern Region office in Dibrugarh District Planters Club, Assam, in a joint effort with Guwahati and Indian Tea Association (ITA) and GAIN, an international NGO working in the field of nutrition as an implementing partner.

Representatives from 11 tea estates, namely Balijan North, Bokel, Basmatia, Chabua, Dikom, Kharjan, Namroop, Nahorkutia, Nahortoli, Nokhroy and Sealkootee were felicitated during the ceremony. Led by FSSAI, Eat Right India is identified as a national movement for ensuring safe, healthy, and sustainable food for all citizens of our nation. This movement has been launched to protect the health of people and the planet by transforming the food ecosystem of the country. It encompasses a bouquet of initiatives that targets food businesses through capacity building and self-compliance and nudges consumers to make the right food choices.

Under the ambit of Eat Right India, the Eat Right Campus initiative aims at safe, healthy, and nourishing food in campuses such as universities, colleges, institutes, workplaces, hospitals, tea estates, jails, hotels (only cafeteria for staff), and Anganwadi centers across the country. The objective is to improve the health of people and the planet and promote the social and economic development of the nation. The Eat Right Campus certification recognizes the efforts of the campus towards ensuring the health of employees, adds prestige and brand value to its name and enables it to inspire others to adopt these best practices. In particular, it offers a unique opportunity to workplaces to showcase their efforts around employee health and wellbeing.

With Eat Right Campus certification, these 11 tea estates now ensure better food safety and hygiene standards of food handling establishments operating in the region, awareness amongst tea workers around safe, healthy, and nourishing diets in the long run by improving behavioral aspects for creating and maintaining a safe and healthy food culture for people in these premises.

The certification process involved training and awareness sessions for food handlers, estates management, and awareness sessions for the worker communities. Basis benchmarks identified by FSSAI in the form of a detailed checklist, an elaborative exercise was conducted to arrive at the implementation based on gap analysis conducted in series of pre-audits. The estates were finally audited by a third-party auditing agency, empaneled by FSSAI for compliance with standards achieved over a protractive period of one year. The standards achieved were far excellence despite challenges in the region, Covid-19 pandemic, and production loss for the tea estates.

Chief executive officer of FSSAI, Arun Singhal, congratulated all the campuses and highlighted that FSSAI is gearing up to scale up its Eat Right Campus’ program over the next two years to promote healthy and safe food across corporate offices, hospitals, government offices and tea estates. Singhal said that the food available on any campus should be safe and healthy. Diet-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart diseases are rising at an alarming rate. He further mentioned that FSSAI is now engaging States/UTs to liaison with local campuses for enrollment. This will expect this initiative to grow exponentially in the coming years from a total of over 75 campuses existing currently across the country.