Street Food Cart Design: A Critical Component of Food Safety

Abstract

Street foods are ready-to-eat foods and beverages prepared and/or sold by vendors and hawkers especially in streets and other similar public places. Street food vendors may be stationary, semi-mobile or mobile as they move from one place to another by carrying their wares on pushcarts, bicycles or in baskets on their heads. Poor hygiene practices followed by street food vendors notably due to lack of access to potable water; inadequate waste collection and disposal facilities and the location of their cart, impact the safety of street food. Petty manufacturers including street food vendors are to be registered under the Food Safety and Standards (Licensing and Registration of Food Businesses) Regulation, 2011 and have to comply with the sanitary and hygiene requirements that have both controllable and non-controllable variables. Design of the street food cart can be an important component for meeting these sanitary and hygiene requirements. Based on a survey of 300 street food vendors in Delhi and rural areas of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh; and case-study research focusing on 20 street food vendors in Delhi it was identified that street food vending cart has a great scope for improvement in its design. Based on the user-centered design approach, problem identification and contextual analysis different designs were finalized covering two-wheeler, three-wheeler, and four-wheeler vending carts that could also meet the regulatory requirements. There is a need to standardize the design of street food carts to improve the levels of food safety.