Systems for Quality Assessment and Food Safety in the Dairy Industry

The dairy industry in India has several unaddressed safety and quality concerns. Adulteration, the fraudulent addition of foreign substances like water, vegetable oil, detergents and urea, is a prime concern in the public domain. Some other concerns are of bacterial spoilage and of effects of cattle health on milk quality. These concerns can be addressed substantially by preventing poor raw milk from entering the supply chain, as goes a phrase in the industry, “The best way to manufacture good milk is to start with a good raw material.”

In this project, the aim is to develop next generation milk analysis instruments for village-level milk collection centers. The objective is to enable testing of raw milk, without significant sample preparation, for multiple quality parameters using a cost-effective and simple-to-use instrument. The proposed technologies are promising and can eventually help increase productivity and product quality for the industry.