What Is Quality Control

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement

I heartily wish to extend heartfelt appreciation and gratitude to numerous mentors, benefactors, and constituents who have collectively endowed the Wherewithal, faith and encouragement for me to navigate and complete my Project journey.

To Dr. Kamlesh Mishra, my primary advisor and unflagging advocate, who mustered devoted, continuing, innovative and adaptive mentorship to impel and shepherd my checked efforts through diverse and abounding challenges, I extend my deep and abiding respect and many, many thanks.

To Prof. Mayanka Singh, my supporting advisor, who gently and patiently endured my academic tardiness, I offer commensurate veneration.

To the faculty and staff of the School of Management and Entrepreneurship, AURO University, Surat

Executive Summary

"We are what we eat" is a timeworn proverb. Our nutritional position, health, physical and mental abilities depend on the food we eat and how we eat it. Access to good quality food has been man's main work from the earliest days of human life. Safety of food is a elementary requirement of food quality. "Food safety" indicates absence or acceptable and safe levels of contaminants, adulterants, naturally happening toxins or any other substance that may make food injurious to health on an acute or chronic basis. Food quality can be considered as a complex feature of food that regulates its value or acceptability to consumers. Besides safety, quality traits include: nutritional value; organoleptic properties such as appearance, texture, taste, colour; and functional properties.

Food systems in developing countries are not all the time as well organized and developed as in the industrialized world. Besides, glitches of growing population, urbanization, lack of resources to deal with pre- and post- harvest losses in food, and difficulties of environmental and food hygiene mean that food systems in developing countries continue to be tensed, unpleasantly affecting quality and safety of food supplies. People in developing countries are therefore visible to a wide range of potential food quality and safety risks.

This report discusses the special glitches of food quality and safety in India as well as their impression on food security and elaborates ways and means of dealing with these difficulties. The first chapter of this report introduces the concept of quality and focuses on how the term "quality" has changed its significance from the ancient times. Second chapter explains as to what quality control is and why quality control management is considered as important these days. Third chapter includes importance of food quality and safety and procedures to ensure the same. Fourth chapter embraces the economic aspect of importance of food quality and safety. Fifth chapter recommends few of the strategies that are required for the change. Further, sixth chapter take account of news updates regarded why product quality and safety gains more importance in India. Lastly, seventh chapter concludes all the points that have been covered in the report.

Introduction – the concept of quality

"Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives." said by William A Foster. Thereby, Product Quality is also a planned activity that ensures product’s ability to fulfill the expectations and needs set by the end user. Consumers expects a product that must work reliably and perform all its functions efficiently. Product Quality is the sum of two viewpoints – It can be subjective or objective. Subjective approach indicates that quality is always in the eyes of the beholder and it completely depends on who is assessing the quality and I what context. Whereas Objective approach indicates that quality can be achieved by producing statistic and defining proper threshold values. These two approaches or perspectives are insufficient when used separately as a subjective evaluation often lacks the methods that allow objective measurement and statistics alone do not provide a complete picture.

Quality, for a product or a service, has two aspects, both of which together make for an optimum definition of the term. The first relate to the features and attributes of the product or service and the second refers to the absence of deficiencies in the product. Thus a quality product meets the expectations of the user through its features and attributes (Wakhlu, 1995). The fitness for use may be termed as the other accepted version of quality (Evans and Lindsay, 1994).

So Product Quality can be redefined as the pool of features and characteristics of a product that contribute to its ability to meet the given requirements.

Product Quality – Timeline

Human Civilizations have always given thrust towards upgrading its living standard continuously by exploiting the Available resources, Scores of work has been done in improving the operating method and techniques to produce better quality objects. With the passage of time, the expectation kept mounting and improved things were produced to meet the expectations, which is a never ending process. The last decade of twentieth century has been a landmark for a developing country like India. The business environment has been totally transformed after the introduction of policy changes and economic liberalization pursued from 1991 by the Indian government. In today’s market, customers are becoming increasingly more vigorous and their expectations are increasing for the product and services in terms of their conformance, reliability, durability, interchangeability, performance, features, appearance, serviceability, environment, user- friendliness, and safety.

Earlier, controlling product quality was based on creating standards for producing acceptable products. By mid- 1950’s, more mature approaches had evolved for controlling quality which comprised statistical quality control and statistical process control also using sequential sampling techniques for following the mean and variance in process performance. During the 1960s, these procedures and techniques were prolonged to the service industry. During 1960–1980, there was a main shift in world markets, with the position of the United States deteriorating while Japan and Europe qualified substantial growth in international markets. Consumers became more aware of the cost and quality of products and services. Firms began to concentrate on total production systems for attaining quality at minimum cost. This trend has sustained, and today the aims of quality control are largely driven by consumer worries and preferences.

There are three views for describing the overall quality of a product:

View of the manufacturer: First is the viewpoint of manufacturer who is first and foremost concerned with the design, engineering, and manufacturing processes involved in making the product. Quality is measured by the degree of conformance to determined specifications and standards, and deviances from these standards can lead to deprived quality and low trustworthiness. Efforts for quality improvement are intended at eliminating defects, the need for scrap and rework, and hereafter overall decreases in production costs.

View of the consumer or user: To consumers, a high-quality product is one that well pleases their preferences and opportunities. This contemplation can comprise a number of features, some of which subsidize little or nothing to the functionality of the product but are important in providing customer satisfaction.

A third view relating to quality is to consider the product itself as a system and to include those features that pertain openly to the operation and functionality of the product. This method should comprise overlap of the manufacturer and customer views.

What is Quality Control?

Quality control is a technique that is used to confirm a certain level of quality in a product or service. It might comprise whatever actions a business deems important to provide for the control and verification of assured characteristics of a product or service. Frequently, it includes thoroughly examining and testing the quality of products or the significances of services. The basic aim of this procedure is to ensure that the products or services that are provided meet detailed requirements and features, such as being reliable, satisfactory, safe and fiscally sound.

Companies that involve in quality control usually have a team of workers who emphasis on testing an assured number of products or observing services being done. The products or services that are inspected usually are chosen at random. The aim of the quality control team is to classify products or services that do not meet a company's definite standards of quality. If a problem is known, the job of a quality control team or professional might include stopping production or service until the difficulty has been corrected. Depending on the exact service or product as well as the type of problem recognized, production or services might not end entirely.

Commonly, it is not the job of the quality control team or professional to spot-on quality issues. Characteristically, other individuals are involved in the process of determining the cause of quality issues and fixing them. Next the problems are overcome and the proper quality has been achieved, the product or service endures production or implementation as usual.

Many types of businesses do these types of quality checks. Producers of food products, for example, often have employees who test the finished products for taste and other qualities. Clothing manufacturers have workers inspect garments to confirm that they are properly sewn. Service-oriented companies often have reps who observe the services being performed or who do follow-up checks to ensure that the whole thing was done properly.

Quality control also might comprise evaluating people. If a company has employees who don't have satisfactory skills or training, have trouble understanding guidelines or are misinformed, the quality of the company's products or services might be reduced. This is particularly important for service-oriented companies, because the employees are the product that they provide to customers.

Often, quality control is jumbled with quality assurance. Though the two are alike, but there are some basic dissimilarities. Quality control is concerned with scrutinizing the product or service — the end result ‐ and quality assurance is concerned with observing the process that leads to the end result. A company would use quality assurance to ensure that a product is manufactured in the right way, thereby reducing or eliminating potential problems with the quality of the final product.

Food Quality and Safety Control

In 2020, the world population will most possibly reach 7.6 billion, an upsurge of 31% over the mid-1996 population of 5.8 billion. Around 98% of the predictable population growth over this period will take place in developing countries. It has also been projected that amongst the years 1995 and 2020 the developing world's urban population will be double, attaining 3.4 billion. This overall growth in population and in the urban population in particular, poses pronounced challenges to food systems. Strengthening of agriculture and animal husbandry; more effective food handling, processing and distribution systems; emerging of newer technologies comprising appropriate application of biotechnology will all have to be oppressed to rise food availability to meet the needs of rising populations. Some of these practices and technologies may also pose potential difficulties of food safety and nutritional quality and call for special care in order to confirm consumer protection.

Hasty urbanization has led urban services to be pushed beyond their limits, causing in inadequate supplies of potable water, sewage disposal and other essential services. This situation further pressures food distribution systems as greatly augmented quantities of food must be transported from rural to urban locations in an environment that is not favorable to hygiene and sanitation. The concern of street foods merits special attention. Recent growth in this sector has been phenomenal with main economic and nutritional inferences in the urban context. Street foods are readily available and affordable to urban populations, and they provide the energy and nutrient needs of large segments of workers and their families in the cities. Clean and nutritious street foods have a positive influence on food security; low quality and unsafe street foods can have a negative influence. National and local authorities should take awareness of the potential of this informal sector to develop food security. In many cases, facilities and exercise need to be provided for hygienic handling of street foods to promise their safety and quality.

It is often said that the poor will consume "anything" to alleviate their hunger. This may or may not be true. To the amount that this phenomenon exists, it only designates the trade-off which people may face in difficult circumstances. On the one hand, survival may hinge mainly on access to a minimum quantity of food. On the other hand, consumption of food which does not meet minimum safety standards, can also jeopardize survival. Governments must take the essential steps through national food security policies, systems and programmes to certify that food quality and safety considerations form an integral part of their food security system. At present many countries lack inclusive national food quality and safety regulations. In weighing the gains in contradiction of the cost of inclusive food quality and safety standards, countries may accomplish that given their social and economic level of development, the cost of certain standards are high relative to the gains, specifically if these higher costs have to be borne by the poor themselves. Yet, some developing countries, with FAO technical assistance, have adopted and implemented comprehensive national food quality and safety criteria based on the international recommended Codex Aliment Arius Commission standards, guidelines and codes of preparation. These countries have instantaneously benefited from higher levels of investment in the food sector, better acceptance by consumers of higher quality and safer domestically produced raw and processed foods, and greatly improved access to foreign markets for their food exports. Meeting these Codex-based standards has also increased proficiency in food production, processing and distribution, helped a lower cost domestic supply of good quality and safe foods, condensed food loss problems and greatly increased export earnings.

The core of all national food laws in industrialized and developing countries alike, is based on the following basic provision, which may be worded contrarily but has similar intent: "Any person who sells to the preconception of the purchaser any food which is not of the nature or is not of the substance, or is not of the quality of the food demanded by the purchaser, shall be guilty of an offence ------" Such legislation inaugurates the will of the governments to protect their populations from unsafe and adulterated foods. This is accomplished through proper food control measures based on well- defined food regulations covering quality and safety of food and its honest performance to the consumer. Any steps taken by governments to strengthen these activities would significantly help in meeting food security needs and their commitments at the WFS.

In all countries the food industry bears the accountability of meeting food quality and safety regulatory requirements. The food industry encompasses the happenings of small-scale farmers and artisanal fisheries, through medium to large-scale producers; food storage; processing; wholesale and retail marketing. Food chains can be as short as from the home garden to the family table or thousands of kilometers long with many mediators. Food preservation, processing and packaging systems can be nominal or highly erudite, but promising food quality and safety in all circumstances should be a constant. Industry must play its role in assuring food quality and safety through the application of quality assertion and risk-based food safety systems utilizing current scientific knowledge. The execution of such controls throughout production, handling, processing and marketing leads to enhanced food quality and safety, increased competitiveness; and, lessening in cost of production and wastage. Through national food control systems, governments should provide a subsidiary infrastructure and take up an advisory and regulatory role.

Improving food quality and safety makes economic sense

More than 800 million populaces, many of them children, are today hungry and malnourished with serious effect on growth and learning capacity of children and the capability of adults to lead fully productive lives. Besides, most of these people are to be found in those parts of the world where such food as they have is often polluted or adulterated, thus decreasing its nutritional quality and imposing severe harm to their alimentary well-being and to their household economies.

Food-borne diseases are a universal problem of great scale, both in terms of human suffering and economic costs. The task of appraising with any correctness the occurrence of food-borne diseases globally is truly difficult as in most countries it is poorly recorded. It is expected that almost 70% of the approximate 1.5 billion episodes of diarrhea that befall in the world yearly are directly caused by biological or chemical adulteration in foods. Even when such diseases are not incurable, they severely surge the effects of poor diet owing to compact intake, nutrient losses and mal-absorption, which may lead to mental obstruction and physical disabilities.

There is no indication that assessed food additives or pesticides used in accordance with international recommendations have been the cause of any harm to humans. There is, though, a risk that the unsuitable use of such chemicals can cause health glitches. Plant toxins have also been occupied in food safety problems. An example is Lathyrus Sativus adulteration in certain food grains which has led to food-borne disease occurrences. Other outbreaks have convoluted pollutants like lead, mercury, cadmium; admixture of mustard seeds with argemone seeds; tarnishing of olive oil with mineral oil. Marine-biotoxins have also been associated in several poisoning episodes. Mold growth by-products called mycotoxins are ubiquitous. Some are powerful carcinogens and can also cause other health difficulties to humans and animals.

Food supply systems in developing countries are often disjointed involving a multitude of middlemen. This disclosures it to various types of fraudulent practices. These may embrace simple adulteration of food with something of reduced value or no value at all, or mislabeling the product with the intent of misleading the consumer. Above and beyond the public health impact due to the reduction in the nutrient content of food or food contamination, the consumer is defrauded. In view of that in developing countries, people spend almost 50% of their earnings on food, and among lower-income households this figure may rise to above 70%, the influence of such fraudulent practices can be quite devastating.

Food is a good meter of the state of the environment in which it is shaped. Monitoring of environmental pollutants in food therefore not only assists in confirming food safety but can also give early notices about the state of the environment, such as level of heavy metal impurity to enable suitable action for maintaining its productivity.

Need for action

Almost all countries have a food control system, how so ever poorly developed, to defend their populations touching unsafe, adulterated, or otherwise poor quality food. This also suggests that food legislation exists signifying governmental policy towards consumer protection. Why then do large sections of the populations in many developing countries still undergo from the after-effects of unsafe, unhygienic or adulterated food, and severe fatalities in food export trade take place annually due to food not meeting the elementary necessities of quality and safety? There are several grounds for this unsatisfactory circumstances which need attention at the level of the food industry and the government. Some of these are enumerated beneath:

Food systems are composite. In the case of developing countries, they are also highly patchy and predominated by small producers. This has its own socio-economic benefits. However, as large amounts of food pass through a multitude of food handlers and middlemen outspreading the food production, processing, storage and distribution chain, control is more problematic and there is a greater risk of revealing food to adulteration or adulteration. Dearth of resources and infrastructure for post-harvest handling, processing and storage leads to severe diminishing of quality and preventable contamination and food harms.

Interaction and cooperation among industry and government on food control matters is often missing. The basic accountability of industry is to produce and market good quality and safe food that is honestly obtainable. It is the duty of the government to make sure compliance by industry to national food quality and safety necessities.

National food control systems undergo serious insufficiencies, including:

They are not centered on modern scientific and management notions using compliance policies, risk assessment, HACCP, transparency, and broad-based involvement of industry, trade and consumers.

Insufficient participation of scientific expertise from the academia, industry, consumers to strengthen the scientific source for food control decision making procedures.

Lack of appropriate facilities such as laboratories.

Lack of resources such trained inspectorate and laboratory staff, funding.

Obstinacy of the system making it hard to cope with developments in food science and technology, varying consumer demands, and newer requirements of trade and industry. Institutional problems to reforms can be formidable and can make disincentives for development of industry causing serious impairment to national economy.

Shortage of coherence among diverse governmental activities concerning agriculture, food, trade, industry and health. Lack of synchronization to achieve optimal effects.

It may be valuable to briefly touch upon some of the basic necessities of food control systems in order to assist countries to review their amenities with a view to making them more effective and operative.

News Updates

Product Quality, Safety Gain More importance in India

Product quality and safety are gaining more importance among consumers in India as multinationals such as Mondelez International Inc., the snacks maker disjointed from Kraft Foods Group Inc., French food and beverage maker Groupe Danone SA and German toy company Simba Dickie Group expand manufacturing and sales in the country, said a report.

The percentage of consumers who believe quality and safety to be important has augmented to 64% from 48% in 2007, said the report by TÃœV SÃœD South Asia Pvt. Ltd, a safety certification and inspection services provider. Their numbers will upsurge in the years to come, giving rise to a similar industry in testing, inspection and certification of products, it said.

"India has become the 20th largest exporting country and the target set for India’s merchandise exports is expected to double to $500 billion in 2013-2014. These exports will need to be tested for their safety to increase their global acceptance," said Ishan Palit, chief executive officer, TÜV SÜD Product Service Division.

The company is aiming a sevenfold rise in Indian revenue by 2020.

Even as consumer mindfulness of the need for product safety upsurges, Indian safety standards are behind those of the UK, the US and Japan and manufacturers have often been found to do just the bare minimum to meet the standards, said Harminder Sahni, managing director, Wazir Advisors, a consulting firm.

TÜV SÜD’s study, the Safety Gauge, is based on independent global research commissioned by TÜV SÜD to investigate consumer and business attitudes towards product safety.

The research was started in the US, the UK, China, India and Japan—markets that epitomize 47% of global gross domestic product. It incorporated surveys of more than 5,000 consumers and 500 managers in manufacturing, distribution and retail concerns that operate in the food and beverage, children’s products and consumer electronics industries.

'Adhere to rules, ensure quality bottled water'

A decade prior, packaged drinking water was something one allied with a traveler from foreign lands. Today, though, this is no longer a luxury and has become commonplace. With this, the examples of seal tampering and falling quality of bottled water have also amplified exponentially. However, confirming that only safe and potable water reaches the consumer is a task that only takes a little effort on the part of the manufacturer and trader.

Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), in link with city-based Anacon Laboratories, prearranged a consumer awareness workshop 'Aquasafe' lately on issues affecting packaged drinking water quality and role of good manufacturing and lab practices in confirming the same. The workshop brought together traders, manufacturers, implementing authorities and consumers to put across their difficulties and issues.

NP Kawle, director and head of BIS, Nagpur, began by telling the consumers that an errant manufacturer is liable for a punishment to the tune of Rs 50,000 and up to a year of imprisonment. "The provisions put up for the companies have been made very user-friendly by BIS. It is always desirable for anybody engaged in trading a product that can affect the health of public to do business honestly. Even if it requires them to price their product higher than others, a company should ensure safety of the consumer by conducting the required tests. These days, people do not mind paying a little more for quality product," he said.

Speaking about the prominence of BIS certification, joint commissioner of Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) SG Annapure confirmed that the authorities did not suppress entrepreneurship by creating rules too strict. "We want more industries in the region as that would bring about progress. At the same time, acts like FSSAI aim to take the industry forward and making it able to compete with the best in the world. Such changes will only help, not hamper, any industry," he said.

"The water quality in Vidarbha is naturally good. However, the units here need to be careful about collecting, handling and packaging water. This is all the more important as 80% diseases spread through water," he said.

Directors of Anacon Labs Dattatray and Sugandha Garway spoke about the treatment required to confirm enhanced quality of packaged water and the problems that could rise. "Quality improvement is a continuous process, with room for improvement at every stage. One can never be satisfied with the quality as it is such an abstract and subjective term. Therefore, it becomes all the more important for the manufacturers to ensure a good quality product," said Sugandha.

Trader Rajkumar Tirpude put across the complications faced by the manufacturers and scientists tried giving a clarification for them all.

Conclusion

Over the past decade, the discussion about food quality, and its constituent parts, has strengthened in the India. The detail of this discussion owes much to the fact, that quality is a practical, business issue. It’s acknowledged that value must be shaped for consumers, and that quality must be managed. There are two vital components the management of quality, i.e., the management of product and process conformity. This report emphases largely on the product quality, i.e. on the fir amid the nature of some raw material, a company’s capabilities, and a consumer’s requirements and buying motives. Food marketers normally exploit the quality concept in order to draw consumers’ attention to their products. The need to draw consideration to separable offerings exists in all consumer concerned with markets, in which the consumers input constitutes one half of the market mechanism. The consumer demands a product, the producers offers it, and finally the consumer evaluates it. Quality in any product relates to individual requirements, which will have been identified in respect of some target market. In the absence of a consumer skilled of perceiving quality, there is none. Hence in advertising terms, quality and similar words acts signals rather than as movers of specific meaning. Specific foods, and food consumption patterns, cam be adopted by a consumer to express certain features of his or her lifestyle.