Mumbai, July 11: Did a bone in your Maharaja Mac crunch in your mouth while lunching at McDonald's? All you have to do is to register a complaint with the restaurant manager and stand back: the fast food major will identify and isolate each and every Maharaja Mac across the country, from the same batch, within three hours. What allows the fast food chain to delink its food chain fast, is a quality and safety system called the Tracability System.A prerequisite for most food companies around the world, McDonald's is one of the first food companies to have introduce the concept in India. With the Tracability System in place it is possible to trace all products and their raw ingredients right from the suppliers' supply facility to the point when it is served at any of the 17 McDonald's restaurants in the country.
``The Tracability System is a quality standard and food safety system in which the basic process entails coding the products with batch numbers and the date of production with the use-throughdate,'' says McDonald's India Limited's Mumbai-based joint venture partner, Amit Jatia. The scope of the process includes all of McDonald's 38 suppliers spread across 10 locations in the country.
Who's that bun?
The process starts with the raw materials being received at the suppliers' plant. Each bag of raw material has to have a batch number and a date of manufacture or harvest on it. All production or value-addition then undertaken at the plants is divided into batches.
For example, in the case of Vista and Kitran Processed Foods, the Maharashtra-based supplier of patties and apple pie to McDonald's, production takes place over four batches of 200 or 400 kgs. Each batch can be identified from the date and time of manufacture and the batch code. For each batch of products, a list of all ingredients that were drawn for that batch identified by the batch number is listed and is kept on record on a `tracking sheet'.
When dispatching the products to McDonald's Thane and Noida-based DistributionCentres (DC), each supplier creates invoices carrying all the batches that have been sent against that invoice. At the distribution center the products are then stored according to the batch number and are sent to the outlets on a first-in/first-out (FIFO) basis. Hence in case of any quality issue at the restaurant with regard to a particular ingredient, the supplier is able to: r Identify all the products and raw material batches that were used to make that ingredient.
Inform McDonald's at Delhi and Mumbai about which batches were sent to them and get them to withdraw the product from the system.Inform the supplier of the raw ingredient with the problem and get him to investigate the raw material that went into the manufacture of the faulty ingredient.``Once we have a track of all remaining products and raw materials that have the offending ingredient, we can analyse the material to find the problem-secure in the knowledge that the products would not cause any harm to any other person,''says Vista And Kitran Food Limited's CEO Jose Azavedo.
On its part McDonald's has created a dedicated `product recovery team' of five to six people who track and monitor the system closely. McDonald's purchasing and quality assurance personnel work closely with the suppliers to put the process in place.
Besides this, the DCs and restaurants are adviced not to accept products without batch, date codes etc. As the fast food major that it has not encountered any major problems with its products so far, the system is yet to be tested with a real-life crisis. However rigorous drills and mock tests conducted at least two to three times a year ensure that the system is well-oiled and ready to roll at the word `emergency'.
Owing to the constant testing for the past three years, the system has been made efficient so that the entire flow of information from the restaurant to the DC to the suppliers and back to the restaurants takes less than three to six hours on an average. While pathological testing to checkfor spoilage and microbial growth takes time, McDonald's is able to minimise the damage by identifying and putting in quarantine the defective batch, in a matter of a few hours.
Almost on cue, the suppliers for McDonald's in India too have started implementing the tool in their other lines of business. For example, Vista and Kitran Foods Limited is using the Tracability System for `Jiffy' its frozen food brand launched in Mumbai and Delhi so far. It might have been spawned at McDonald's but soon there will be no tracing how far the practice spreads across the country's food processing industry.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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