Sparkling white tiles, gleaming metal counters, spotlessly clean knives and the soft humming of refrigerators… This could be the sight that greets you when you walk into a run-of-the-mill meat shop on the streets of Chennai. Not in a few years or even a few months, but right now.

The Meat Sciences Department of the Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University (TANUVAS), has been providing meat retailers free designs and consulting services to convert their shops into places where hygiene is the priority – and they have been doing it for the past five years.

“We have been giving out designs and consultation to any entrepreneur who wishes to start up or modernise his business,” says Robinson Abraham, Head of theMeat Services Department. “All they have to do is approach us.” Consulting at a private firm would be prohibitively expensive to the small businesses that most meat shops were, he pointed out.

But when asked about what these five years of free consulting has engendered, he points to just one operating shop in Chennai. The BatchaBai meat shop in Kilpauk stands as a silent testimony to what a few well-thought out improvements in slaughter house design can do.

There are counters made of stainless steel, teflon cutting boards, rounded edges to prevent wiping hands on tables and white tiles to make any spattered blood visible. Compared to the ill-lit, ill-washed rooms that most meat shops offer, the sight is almost unreal in its cleanliness. “These are very small but necessary design elements,” points out R Narendrababu, one of the three professors in the department. “They improve the hygiene of the shop tremendously.”

The reason why hygiene comes in a sad second in the owners’ list of priorities, he adds, is because consumers themselves have been desensitised to the dangers of bad hygiene. “Unless people refuse to buy meat from shops that don’t adhere to basic hygiene norms, retailers will never feel the need to implement these practices,” he says.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Chennai / by Jonahan Ananda – Chennai / January 29th, 2014