Akshaya Patra will be opening its centralised kitchen at Surat, Gujarat, on 15th February, 2015. Formally inaugurating the kitchen will be Chief Minister of Gujarat, Anandiben Patel. The event will also be graced by Guest of Honour Nanubhai Vanani, Minister of State – Education; and presided over by Chanchalapathi Dasa, Vice-Chairman of Akshaya Patra.
The kitchen has been sponsored by the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) which donated four acres of land on lease, and the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) funded the construction of the kitchen, machinery and meal delivery vehicles.
The Surat wing of Akshaya Patra's operations started in June 2012 from an interim kitchen at the same location. The new kitchen has been operational from June 2014.
Some of the features of the new Surat kitchen are:
Steam generation for cooking from boilers capable of producing 2 tons of steam per hour
Roti making machine capable of producing upto 40,000 rotis per hour
Seven stage rice cleaning machine
Upto 5,000 litres per hour of water generated for cooking using Reverse Osmosis
High capacity machine for vegetable cutting
Food grade oil tank capable of storing 17,000 kg of oil for almost a month's operation
Usage of almost 6,000 kg of rice, 5,000 kg of wheat flour, 4,000 kg of pulses and 8,000 kg of vegetables every day
Implementation of quality tools like Kaizen, 5S, Lean, GMP, GHP and Six Sigma
Implementation of ISO 22000:2005 standards in the kitchen operations, and ISO certification underway
Using 41 custom built meal distribution vehicles the Surat kitchen will feed over 1.6 lakh children across 383 Government schools. The kitchen will also be feeding 1004 Anganwadi centres in the region every day.
Visit our gallery to view images of the new kitchen.