IJFANS International Journal of Food and Nutritional Sciences

ISSN PRINT 2319 1775 Online 2320-7876

Food quality during Covid-19 pandemic in south India: Consumer survey and DART (Detect Adulteration with Rapid Test) Analyses

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Katta Sanvika , Bollu Sai Sruthi , Dr. Jhinuk Gupta

Abstract

Ensuring the availability of high-quality food is always challenging, especially for developing countries like India. Long-term lockdown, shortages of staff and restrictions on transportation during the Covid-19 pandemic are anticipated to show a major impact on the country‟s overall food supply chain, which in turn may affect the quality of food. Therefore, It is highly important to find out the true conditions of food quality during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this current work, two methods were adopted for the purpose; a) An online consumer survey was conducted to know the consumers‟ perception about food quality in south India during the pandemic. 180 Responses were collected from 5 states of South India using random purposive sampling technique and were analysed using descriptive analytical tools. Majority of the respondents complained about the worsening of the quality of milk and dairy products. Survey also revealed that quality issues are more frequently encountered in cities and with the foods procured from unorganized sectors. b) DART analyses were performed on 130 food samples, which were randomly collected from parts of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Kerala. Results showed that overall 41.5% of those tested samples were adulterated in one way or the other. Beverage like coffee powder samples were found to be most frequently adulterated (100%). Occurrence of adulteration was more in Andhra Pradesh compared to other states of study. However, no trends could be seen that loose products are always more adulterated compared to their branded counter parts.

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