We Provide Unlimited Food For Education
We Provide Unlimited Food For Education
The Challenge & Our Solution
The Challenge:
Extreme poverty frequently forces children from low-income families to drop out of school to earn money.
Our Goals:
The Akshaya Patra Solution:
In 2000, the Government of India declared that every child in its government schools shall receive a meal as part of its plan to address classroom hunger. It launched the Midday Meal program to tackle the enormous task of feeding 120 million children. Over the past 19 years, Akshaya Patra has been a proud partner with the government of India for its Mid-day Meal Program.
This meal is often the only meal a child receives in the day and it serves as a critical intervention to address hunger and education simultaneously. This proposition directly addresses 7 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – blueprints for peace and prosperity.
The 7 goals include:
$20 provides a nutritious school lunch daily for one child for an entire school year. Visit our Donation Page to give the gift of a brighter future today!
Our Program
Food:
The Akshaya Patra Foundation is a secular not-for-profit organization that cooks, transports, and serves 1.8 million midday meals to government school children in 20,000 schools across 14 States and 2 Union Territories in India, every day.
We work closely with the Department of Food Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and The National Institute of Health and Family Welfare in India to design a vegetarian menu that would contain the right amount of lipids, micronutrients, calories, and proteins that growing children need for healthy development. The menu is designed to cater to the preferences of the local palate and is continuously optimized to improve taste and nutrition.
Children attending Akshaya Patra schools come from low-income families who typically make less than $2.00 per day and are unable to afford vegetables, grains, and milk – basically, the bare necessities a child needs to grow.
We provide unlimited food. Second and third helpings are always available. Frequently, younger siblings of students come to school at mealtime or students pack leftovers in containers to take home.
Akshaya Patra provides a balanced-nutritious meal, daily, usually consisting of three items, with dessert served once a week. Meals are often supplemented with peanut butter paste, fortified rice, and other innovative ways of improving caloric and nutrient value.
1800000
Number of children served per day
498000000
Number of meals served per year
Education:
Food is the fuel the body needs to function optimally. We could be sitting in a class in an ivy-league school, and if we haven’t eaten in the last 24 hours nothing makes sense. Growing children need to eat a good meal that provides them with the fuel to learn and engage with life.
Children drop out of school because they need to work to support themselves and their families. Their inability to access even one nutritional meal per day severely limits their capacity to concentrate in the classroom and receive a proper education.
We provide a hospitable environment and the resources necessary to help children succeed at school. Our program has been proven to increase the net enrollment ratio (especially girls), attendance, and performance levels of students in primary grades.
Kitchens
The Akshaya Patra Foundation operates 65 kitchens across 14 States & 2 Union Territories in India.
The Akshaya Patra Foundation operates 65 kitchens across 14 States & 2 Union Territories in India.
Our kitchens operate at ISO standards, 21 kitchens are ISO certified. We have adopted Six Sigma, Kaizen, blockchain, and IoT technologies and follow stringent quality control measures and procurement practices based on standards adapted from the Food Safety Standards Act 2006 (FSSA).
With frugal innovation, Akshaya Patra’s centralized kitchens cook between 10,000 to 250,000 meals within 6 hours prioritizing innovation, efficiency, and safety. We employ 6,000 men and women, 30% of which are women. Cooking to consumption time is 4 hours or less.
In locations where difficult geographical terrain does not support a centralized kitchen model, we have successfully created a decentralized model where women from the local area cook up to 5,000 meals daily. This model provides rural women with a sustainable source of income, thus helping them break the cycle of poverty.
Innovation
A culture of innovation and improvement has ensured that Akshaya Patra can effectively scale production to reach more children.
- Chapatti (roti) Baking System – Our custom designed chapatti machines can cook 60,000 chapattis per hour.
- Rice Preparation System – Our advanced steam-based rice preparation system can prepare 1,200 liters of rice in just 15 minutes. Easy-tilt cauldrons allow cooked rice to be quickly transferred to specially designed insulated containers for distribution.
- Daal/Sambar System – Sambar is produced in custom cauldrons capable of preparing 1,200 liters of sambar in 15 minutes.
- Green Energy – Thermite boilers in our kitchens burn sustainable agri-waste (ground nut shells and grain husks) briquettes to reduce carbon emission and cooking times. Each briquette boiler saves 788.95 Megatons of carbon from being released in the atmosphere.
- Rice and vegetables are triple washed before cooking and the same water is re-used for washing delivery vehicles.
Akshaya Patra was founded on the spirit of giving. We follow an ‘open source’ model of innovation, encouraging other non-profits and countries to adopt and adapt its technology freely.
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Local, fresh vegetables are procured on a daily basis. We follow FIFO and FEFO methods when issuing raw materials for production in order to identify, store and retrieve raw materials in a manner that reduces waste.
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75 quality checks prior to, during and after the cooking process occur to ensure hygiene, quality of service and taste.
Food is at an optimum 65 degrees when it is served to the children. There is a direct correlation between the temperature of the meal and consumption – the hotter the meal, the higher the consumption.
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Cuisine is catered to the local palate, making it more appealing to children. For example, North Indian cuisine is roti-based and South Indian cuisine is rice-based.
Menus are rotated every 30 days.
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We follow Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and are subject to monthly inspections.
Kitchens employ gravity flow mechanisms and fresh fruits & vegetables are processed via high-speed, mechanized cutters on conveyor belts, to minimize the need for human handling.
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We use stainless steel 304 grade vessels that are steam-sterilized to pack the food prior to being transported.
Vehicles use a puffed body to reduce temperature loss and a honeycomb structure to hold vessels upright, to retain freshness.
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Logistic charting for route optimization for safety and on-time delivery.
Our specialized, GPS-equipped vehicles are heat and dust insulated, ensuring food arrives hot and fresh.
Each vehicle successfully delivers over 150,000 meals in 6 hours, daily.
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We receive feedback from schools on a daily basis.
Quality Officers review feedback and initiate appropriate improvement actions.
VISIT A KITCHEN
You’re invited!
Come see for yourself how a mega-kitchen cooks thousands of meals within hours. As long as schools are in session, a kitchen and school visit must be a part of your trip to India!
Looking for ideas on how to engage your company’s employees? Are you interested in seeing how we do what we do? Contact us for volunteering opportunities at kitchens@apusa.org.
Eat for a Cause: Looking to offer nutritious, low-cost meals to your employees? We offer catering services in areas where we have kitchens in India. A portion of the sales goes towards feeding children.
