AMERICAN PERISCOPE. Let’s play Maggi!

Throw away the Scrabble board. Candy Crush? That’s so last year. The latest game is in town. Testing Maggi!

Everybody is doing it, and going by press reports, the game is exciting because the result is unpredictable. It may have lead, or it may not. It may satisfy Indian standards or it may not. Throw the dice again.

This game hit the stores when labs in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh found lead levels high in the noodles. On June 5, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) banned it because 30 out of 72 samples were found to contain lead above permissible limits. There was also mislabelling about MSG.

Safe bets

The race began amongst Indian States, with some testing and finding it okay and others banning it. The Central Food Technological Research Institute found it to be okay but its conclusions were dismissed by another government agency.

The All India Food Processors, a lobbying agency, found the timing right to start playing and complained that the testing process is faulty.

Now, it has become a global game, like cricket and soccer. Newspapers report that the US, the UK, Canada, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand have tested and found Maggi safe for consumption.

A super market chain in Africa has withdrawn it from five nations. Very soon, leading think tanks and publishing houses will come up with rankings of countries on a Maggi Safety Index — the country where Maggi is the safest. My bets are on Switzerland.

Then the courts found it so much fun and felt the need to regulate.

On August 13, the second round of the contest began with the Bombay High Court directing the company to undertake fresh tests of the product.

The court observed that testing had not been done in accredited laboratories before the banning decision. This has opened two levels of the game now, accredited and un-accredited testing.

Criticise or celebrate? Meanwhile, the only one who does not want to play is Nestle! After initially reporting that the product meets lead standards once it is prepared, although the individual ingredients may exceed limits, the company went silent.

The CEO Etienne Benet went AWOL. The media couldn’t figure out where he was hiding. Then out popped Suresh Narayanan.

The Indian media loved it. They did not know whether to criticise Nestle for Maggi or celebrate the fact that another ‘foreign’ company is now headed by an Indian.

We all waited with bated breath for Narayanan to tell us that everything was alright. But no. He had also read the Nestle manual for CEOs which starts with the advice, don’t speak, don’t explain, HIDE.

But wait, we can continue to play the testing game. You can buy lead test kits from hardware stores. The method is fairly simple.

Maggi has withdrawn several thousand packets from the shelves. I advise them not to destroy the product. Donate it to the schools. Make them freely available. The company can have a big event and draw a winner from all those submitted. The prize? A lifetime supply of Maggi!

The writer is a professor at the Jindal Global Business School, Delhi NCR and at Suffolk University, Boston

COMMENT NOW