A study on status of food processing sector in Cachar district of Assam

Food processing is any action or procedure that changes the initial food or raw materials used to produce food. This involves processes like washing, chopping, pasteurizing, freezing, heating, milling, extruding, packeting or adding ingredients to foods. Processing of food can take place at home, out-of-home and in industries. Hence it becomes clear that the majority foods we eat in our day-to-day lives are processed to some extent. Besides growing economy of a country, sufficient disposable income, busy life style, in India the prime reason for growing trend of inclination towards consumption of processed food is due to traditional joint families was replaced by nuclear families. In most nuclear families both men and women going out to work and found very less time to cook. However Indian women still use to do cooking in the kitchen during the weekends using time saving cooking techniques and using some vital processed foods like masala, curd, Cheena or paneer etc. The present study focuses on the registered Micro Small and Medium enterprises (MSMEs) based food processing industries operating in the far-flung district of Cachar located in Assam. It also highlights the higher growth potential observed among the food processing categories in the region and witnessed growing demand of local MSME based food processing industries.