During peak hours, long queues worm their way towards five counters at a fancy fast food outlet in south Mumbai. With clockwork precision, the production caller monitors the traffic.
He knows what are the frontrunners and the current favourites in his outlet, and keeps some packs ready to eat. But he is constantly on his toes, checking the time.
Ten minutes later, he takes a handful of packs and dumps them in the bin. Why? They are not fit to be sold.
This outlet is not alone in dumping food. Consider this. On average, Subway restaurant's 15 retail outlets in the country sell about 5,000 sandwiches a month. And the wastage? Two per cent. One to two per cent of the burgers packed at McDonald's 48 outlets are discarded. And the same amount of food is thrown away at Pizza Hut.
Even as the Rs 500 crore (Rs 5 billion) fast food industry's sales are set to explode 12-fold to Rs 6,000 crore (Rs 60 billion) by 2005, industry experts estimate that fast food chains and casual eating places operating in India discard food worth Rs 1-2 crore (Rs 10-20 million) every year. All this in the name of quality.
Sure, the wastage has come down drastically, with fast food chains constantly driving down inventory costs, sprucing up supply-chain management and cutting out inefficiencies in the system.
And the Indian joints? A food and beverage manager, who put in his papers recently at a leading Mumbai hotel, couldn't have put it better.
"It is not a quality issue for us. With a moral baggage of 'how can we waste food when so many poor people don't even get a square meal a day', the leftovers are simply recycled as exotic buffet," he says.
Shocking? "Depends on how you look at it. Our thought processes are in sync with those of our US headquarters," says Chetan Arora, business development head, western region, Subway.
"This means that the consumer should be served the best quality food in the shortest possible time," he adds.
At the double arches, a packed burger is only valid for 10 minutes.
With a stringent supply-chain management, McDonald's takes pains to maintain the shelf life of the 250-odd ingredients that go into a burger. But once anything is cooked or fried, as in a pattie, the game changes.
Says S D Saravanan, quality assurance manager of McDonald's: "Even though it is okay to consume, our global parameters for food safety and quality do not permit us to pass it on to the consumer."
According to him, as soon as a hot pattie is placed in the bun, the lettuce loses its crunchiness, while the ketchup makes the bun soggy, impacting the overall quality. "We make no compromises. We'd rather take a hit on our profit and loss accounts, but not serve a 10-minute old burger to our customers," he adds.
Or take Pizza Hut, which makes three or four types of pizza dough and 20-odd toppings with a 14-24 hour shelf life. "We keep very low inventories, but if anything is left behind, it is discarded," says Sanjiv Mediratta, director, quality assurance, at Yum Restaurants, which owns the Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut brands.
Clearly, if quality standards are the crux of their operations, there's a reason.
"Everybody abroad is out to get you on quality discrepancies. So, we have to be doubly careful with international brands. It may not happen here, but we can't take chances," says Arora.
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