-B Swaminathan (publisher@chefbharath.com)
Protein Foods & Nutrition Development Association of India (PFNDAI) which aims to create awareness about Nutrition and gives support to the food industry to produce high quality, safe food products, has recently appointed Swechha Soni as the manager for Food and Nutrition.
Joined as an intern with PFNDAI Swechha had worked in R&D, learned more about food & nutrition, and had formulated Iron-fortified Ragi cookies before joining as a full-time employee. In her stint as Nutritionist, she had taken the initiative of starting the PFNDAI page on various social media platforms- initially on Facebook and LinkedIn. Some of her initiatives included updating the virtual world on the updates from the association, Nutrition Awareness Activities in colleges, healthy recipes, scientific articles, and findings. “Initially, we had only a handful of followers on both our pages but we realised that people are actually keen on knowing us more and the number of followers gradually increased. So looking at the response and realizing that our members/ viewers want something more, we started our own blog and also a page on Instagram,” says Swechha who also identified few authors for the blog, and also started posting on nutrition, food science, and technology and regulations.
She also played a key role in conducting various seminars across various schools and colleges across India to educate students regarding the importance of food and nutrition other than being the face of the association in various events and seminars. In her new role, she aims to have a team with more structured roles and taking up more diverse projects for spreading nutrition awareness supporting defined modules. “This is the age of digitalization and my plans are to deliver information to our members and viewers in more interactive ways through the medium of short videos, graphical representation.”, she says. While the engagement is more and people have enough knowledge to make right-eating choices and are capable of distinguishing healthy foods from bad. Swechha is also expected to collaborate with similar firms to work together for not just organizational development but also for the benefit of the industry and the consumers.
