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The Commissioner of Food Safety in Telangana recently announced that a warehouse owned by Blinkit was raided in Hyderabad and discovered to be violating multiple food safety and hygiene norms. The space of the grocery delivery service, owned by Zomato, was flagged on multiple counts – ranging from dusty premises, expired food items, bug-infested products among other things. As the food safety raids across Hyderabad continue to be on the rise, raising concerns among citizens, the Blinkit warehouse located in Devar Yamjal of Medhal Malkajgiri district, was exposed for not having a FoSTaC trainee on the premises in addition to the food handlers working without proper gloves or headgear.
To make things worse, the medical certificates of the food handlers were not available for cross checking either while the warehouse stocked cosmetic products in close proximity of food products. A notice was also issued to the operators for being unable to produce a Whole Farm Congruence Trade and Services Pvt Ltd license. Many food products worth 30,000 Rupees like raw peanut butter, poha, sooji, besan and bajra were discovered to be expired and seized immediately. The alarming list of issues included a potential infestation in 52,000 Rupees worth of Whole Farm ragi flour and toor dal.
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Food samples that included the two food products as well as finger millet flour, pigeon peas and whole pearl millet were also sent to a lab for testing on grounds of suspicion. While the delivery service has not issued an official statement in response to the raid, a spokesperson for the brand emphasised that hygiene standards are taken seriously in order to preserve the quality of their products. What action the food safety officials plan on undertaking to combat the violation remains to be seen. Watch this space for the latest in food news across India.
