CHENNAI: Home-bound for months now, are your taste buds craving for your favourite street food? Soon, you can have it delivered at your doorstep. What more? Now, the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) will ensure that the food is cooked under hygienic conditions and comes in better packaging.
The GCC, in association with Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), National Urban Livelihood Mission and Swiggy, is roping in 50 street food vendors across the city, and they will begin home-deliveries in two weeks.
In the first phase, FSSAI has trained 500 vendors on food safety and issued them license. Of them, 50 will go onboard in two weeks time. "For the first phase, street vendors have been selected from areas where their population is more. This includes T Nagar, Broadway, Besant Nagar and Purasawalkam among others," said a city corporation official.
Swiggy will have a separate tab on its home screen to display the street food vendors. "During training, they have been taught on hygiene, packaging and branding. So, keeping all the safety protocols in mind, they will be provided the necessary gear and branded with a proper name. The vendors were also educated on how to use the application and attend to orders," said the official.
Their training schedule included PAN and FSSAI registration, technology/partner app usage, menu digitisation, pricing, hygiene and packaging by using the best practices. The project is a part of the Central government's PM Street Vendor's AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) scheme, which aims at helping street vendors grow their businesses, which has been severely hit by the Covid pandemic.
According to official data from GCC, there are 24,000 registered street vendors in the city, and the civic body aims to bring all of them onboard. "The street vendors are aware of the changing pattern of food business. So, they have shown an instant interest.
Public too now prefer to eat from the comfort of their homes. We were also very interested in executing this because the GCC had been planning on streamlining street vendors for quite sometime now. This project will be very helpful for the street vendors," the officials said.