**4. Safety of milk and dairy products**

The demand for safe, high-quality foods with a long shelf-life is increasing day by day in the country. This reflects an improvement in the income as well as knowledge and awareness level of common masses. However, milk and milk products are biochemically unstable; i.e., they deteriorate very quickly and they accept foreign odors and materials very easily. Hence, maintaining the quality of milk poses a great challenge to the producers, collectors, and/or processors until it reached to the final destination. This is a fact that the dairy industry is highly unregulated in Pakistan, and the marketing chain is exclusively in the private sector. Generally, the milk is produced under compromised hygienic conditions that results in poor quality. Adulteration has been very common to increase milk volumes at farmer and intermediaries level in the past. The quality of milk is ensured by boiling at high temperatures during household consumption. Lack of hygiene, adulteration by various agents, and absence of a cold chain were identified as the primary contributors to low-quality milk in the past [2].

### **4.1 Measures being taken**

Maintaining a high standard of hygiene is one of today's most important milk production objectives. The hygiene level directly influences the production's economical result, and dairies are enforcing this by steadily raising their quality requirements for raw milk. More importantly though, consumers are concerned about the safety of dairy products and the conditions under which these are produced. It is critically important to ensure the high quality at each step of this chain. It is, therefore, required that raw milk should be produced from healthy animals under good hygienic conditions and all control measures be applied from production to consumption to protect human health.

Several dairy development programs for the production, distribution, and processing of hygienic milk have been started during the last two decades at private sector. These programs seek to ensure the production of hygienic milk by providing farmer education, implementing strict quality tests, and establishing cold chain collection and supply systems.

### *4.1.1 Quality tests and hygienic measures*

The corporate private sector has implemented various strategies to ensure milk quality and safety at collection. At the first place, various milk qualitative and quantitative tests at village (VMC) and regional milk collection centers (RMC) are performed. These include organoleptic, temperature, clot on boiling, fat%, solids not fat, total solids, and specific gravity. Tests for aflatoxins, antibiotics, and physiochemical characteristics are performed at RMC to ensure product processing quality and safety. A complete list of the tests performed at dairies is presented in **Table 2**.

At the second place during processing or intermediate steps, various systems for quality and safety management, e.g., ISO 9000, FSMS 22000, total quality management (TQM), hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP), and many other ISO certificates are adopted [13].

### *4.1.2 Farmers' support*

 The large dairy organizations like Nestle and Engro have provided farmers with the dairy inputs that have facilitated enhance and good quality milk production. Nestlé Pakistan Ltd. through its Kisan Club (https://www.nestle.pk/asset-library/


*Current Standing and Future Challenges of Dairying in Pakistan: A Status Update DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.83494* 

### **Table 2.**

*List of physiochemical, chemical, and organoleptic tests performed at regional milk collection centers and processing plants in Pakistan.1* 

documents/financial\_reports/csv\_report\_2016.pdf: accessed October 19, 2018) aimed for major improvements in dairy farm sustainability by helping farmers decrease farm input cost and increase productivity resulting in better economic returns. Kisan Club helps achieve that by providing access to subsidized farm supplies like chillers and farm machinery, financial support through milk advances, and bank loans and technical services about health, breeding, and management. The results of this project showed an increased hygienic milk production and ensured supply to the collectors.

## *4.1.3 Rewards and punishments*

Many commercial milk collection organizations such as Engro Foods Ltd. and Nestle Pakistan Ltd. have adopted a reward and punishment system to ensure milk quality and wholesomeness. Engro Foods Ltd., for example, has adopted such a system, which is called as Incentive Systems, and they have introduced the following incentives:


3. Total plate count (TPC) incentive will be given @Rs. 0.5/L to only CDF if his milk sample TPC falls under 200,000/mL of milk. The rate of this incentive is reduced to Rs. 0.2/L if TPC level falls between 200,000 and 300,000/mL of milk.
