Quality Certification of Spices: Seven Decades of Progress

This chapter explores the birth and growth of quality control and its importance in regulatory compliance and legal handling of spices, with emphasis on Indian context. Quality control involves checking and approval of various products as a result of manual or mechanical processing, right from simple sorting, grading, or drying to sophisticated processing steps to remove contamination even at trace level. In India, the specifications for each spice item have been fixed by national regulators, most importantly by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), in order to ensure compliance of various quality parameters to the stipulated legal limits as fixed based on scientific research. India is the largest producer and consumer of spices in the world, exporting spices to countries like the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, and Middle East. So, it is important to comply to the standards of such countries for marketing the produce. It was under such a scenario that India started testing various contaminants like heavy metals, pesticides, and natural toxins and microbiological parameters. Though the quality checking and control was the responsibility of the trader in the initial stage of spice trade, due to the increasing quality complaints from the importers, the government of India started intervening in the matter to solve the issues. The government, through an act of the parliament, called Spices Board Act 1986, constituted the Spices Board, primarily for the quality maintenance of cardamom and, over the time, for other spices. Spices Board has taken several initiatives to sensitize the manufacturers and the farmers equally to get the idea of quality control percolate down to the lowest level of the primary producers. Improving the marketability of the spices is very crucial for augmenting the export which in turn benefit the country, trader, and farmer. The international and national standards necessitate the cultivation of organic products to safeguard the health of people and the environment. This chapter highlights the importance of spice export through maintaining the quality of the product because there is no shortcut toward quality. Increasing the export will bring prosperity to the country and ultimately to the farmer. The backbone of our country is the farmer, and without improving the quality of life of farmer, we cannot prosper.