ERA OF QUALITY
AT THE AKSHAYA
PATRA
FOUNDATION Presented By:
Somya Jaiswal (181259)
Swapnil Chaudhari (181262)
Aman Anand (181404)
Souvik Choudhary (181454)
Quality is all about delivering a safe, tasty,
nutritious, hot, meal on time and every time.
Muralidhar, Quality Head, The Akshay Patra Foundation
Akshay Patra
• The Akshaya Patra Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation headquartered in
Bengaluru, India.
• Founded by Swami Prabhupada, Founder of Acharya ISKCON in 2000.
• It strives to eliminate classroom hunger by implementing the Mid-Day Meal
Scheme in the government schools and government-aided schools.
• Akshaya Patra also aims at countering malnutrition and supporting the right to
education of socio-economically disadvantaged children.
• Since 2000, Akshaya Patra has been concerting all its efforts towards providing
fresh and nutritious meals to children on every single school day.
• Partnership with the Government of India and various State Governments, along
with the persistent support from corporates, individual donors, and well-wishers.
Contd.
• Akshaya Patra has 46 kitchens spread across 12 states in India, a result of the
successful partnership with the Government of India, various State
Governments and generous supporters.
• 17,65,597 children are receiving mid-day meal from Akshay Patra.
• The Akshaya Patra uses a hub and spoke model, they cook large quantity of food
and distribute to schools in slums and villages.
• Centralized kitchens were developed with high degree of automation
• Decentralized kitchens were built to serve the schools in remote villages and
areas.
• Their kitchens are ISO certified.
KPI at TAPF
KPI already in place
• Temperature of food at time of delivery
• Delivery before noon
Additional KPIs to be focused
• Percentage of food wastages.
• Percentage of food consumed.
• Improvement in school attendance and
performance
Operating Model
Food
Procurement Storage Loading Delivery
Preparation
There are 5 major processes each carrying a significant amount of
weight, meaning that the full process would break down if one of the
major steps were not carried out successfully.
Challenges
1. Building the culture of quality
• The procurement of raw materials happened through PPP mechanism
involving many stakeholders and that complicated the operational systems.
• Moreover, the food preparation techniques varied according to local
preferences which lead to increasing variability in operations and
management.
• The key challenges faced by the management were as follows:
> How to standardize the process
> Ensuring that suppliers conform to acceptable quality standards.
> Ensuring safety in food preparation delivery process.
Steps Taken
• In order to establish standards , TAPF applied for ISO certification and six of its
kitchens were ISO certified within a year (2008).
• TAPF received the Det Norske Veritas certificate for food safety. In 2013 11 out
of the 20 kitchens were ISO 22000 certified.
• In order to ensure that suppliers conform to the acceptable quality standards,
TAPF implemented Supplier Quality Management System (SQMS).
• SQMS was concerned with the quality standards of raw materials procured and
involved monitoring sub-processes like supplier-selection, supplier-qualification
and supplier rating.
2. Quality during precooking operations
• Due to huge scale of operations at TAPF the cutting and washing of vegetables was
a major challenge in centralized kitchen.
• Sanitization standards with a 3-step process of cleaning vegetables were
introduced.
• Pre-processing had two critical control points:
1. Washing of vegetables in chlorinated water with chlorine levels of (55ppm to
95ppm).
2. The temperature in the cold storage was maintained at 0-4 degree Celsius.
In order to properly identify, store and retrieve raw materials TAPF followed FIFO
and FEFO approach.
3. Supplier Quality Management
Food corporation of India (FCI) provided 50% of rice requirement.
Implementation of Supplier Quality Management System (SQMS) which covered
sub processes:
• Supplier selection
• Supplier Qualification
• Supplier rating
TAPF Quality Control process ensured that raw materials were accepted only
after thorough Quality Inspection.
4. Automation of Kitchens
• Initially, TAPF had received many complaints due to manual cutting of
vegetables.
• In response TAPF introduced automated cutting machines which could
cut the vegetables into small and equal sizes.
• It increased the vegetable consumption and reduced the cutting time.
• The another automation in the kitchen was the addition of roti-making
machine which was capable of making 40,000 rotis/hour.
5. Quality during Cooking Operation
• Major challenges: balancing taste & nutrition and customize meal to local
preferences.
• Nutritional value of meal were tested in approved lab by experts.
• 100% adherence to recipes was ensured and quality checks by production
supervisors.
• Vessels are made of best grades of stainless steel.
• Contamination was prevented by steam sterilization of vessels.
6. Feedback from the School
• Through feedback mechanism, Back tracing of the problems faced by
consumers to TAPF’s internal processes and all the way to suppliers.
• Internal customer care to facilitate grievance redressal and children were
encouraged to call.
• Institutionalised Good Manufacturing Process (GMP) audits and surprise
audits to ensure food safety and quality.
• Which results in significant improvements.
7. Continuous Improvement
• Kaizen projects for kitchen workers
• Plan, Do, Check and Act(PDCA) projects for office staff members.
• Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control (DMAIC) projects for staff
members.
• As a result of this many staff members undergoing PDCA came up with various
improvement plans.
• Also 14 six sigma projects were completed in 2013 and 6 PDCA projects in
2014.
PDCA CYCLE
DMAIC Process
Define
• In this step, TAPF found that preprocessing required 4.30 hours and 8.30
hours for vessel sterilization.
• SIPOC (Supplier, input, process, output, customer) were analyzed. The gaps
were found in inputs and processes segment.
• The goal was to reduce cooking cycle time by 1 hour at VK hill kitchen in
the next three month.
Measure
• Overall data samples were collected :106
• Average production time : 500 min i.e. 8 hours and 20 minutes
• Observation was in line with initial observation.
Analyze
• Process map was prepared for rice and sambar.
• Team members also visited kitchens during different times to understand the
root cause of delays.
• Pareto analysis was used to identify the root cause of the delay.
Process Map for Rice Cooking
Cause and Effect Diagram
Pareto Analysis
Thank You!
