From offshore platforms to roadside kitchens: How Maud Lindsay-Gamrat is taking food safety to the streets

The founder of Ghana’s largest catering company has trained over 1,300 street food vendors in the same food safety standards her team applies on oil rigs and mining sites. She believes every Ghanaian deserves safe food — not just multinational workers.

Maud Lindsay-Gamrat knows what it takes to feed workers on an offshore oil platform. A single food safety incident can shut down operations, cost millions and end contracts. For fifteen years before starting her own company, she mastered these standards at a multinational in-flight catering business where feeding passengers at 35,000 feet left no room for error.

Now she is taking that same discipline to an unlikely place: Ghana’s street food vendors.

Through the Clean Bites initiative under the Atlantic Cares Foundation, Lindsay-Gamrat’s company has trained over 1,300 street food vendors across Ghana in safe food handling and sanitation practices. It is the same rigour Atlantic Catering applies on offshore platforms and mining sites, adapted for market stalls and roadside kitchens.

“Excellence shouldn’t be reserved for multinationals,” Lindsay-Gamrat told Myjoyonline. “A food safety incident can shut down an oil rig. But it can also make a family sick. We should hold ourselves to the same standard regardless of who we are feeding.”

It is a radical idea in a country where street food is a way of life but food safety training remains inconsistent. Millions of Ghanaians eat from vendors daily — workers grabbing breakfast before shifts, families buying dinner on the way home, students fuelling late-night study sessions. Yet the informal food sector operates largely outside the quality systems that govern corporate catering.

Lindsay-Gamrat saw this gap not as someone else’s problem but as an extension of her mission. “Every Ghanaian deserves safe food,” she said. “If we have the expertise to meet international standards for multinationals, why wouldn’t we share that knowledge with the vendors feeding our communities?”

The #CleanStreetBites programme teaches vendors practical food safety skills drawn from Atlantic Catering’s international certifications — ISO standards for food safety management, environmental management and occupational health that remain rare across West Africa’s hospitality sector. The training covers hygiene, safe storage, temperature control and sanitation practices that can prevent food-borne illness.

Atlantic Catering & Logistics Ltd. is Ghana’s largest hospitality company. It employs 600 people, ranks 20th on the Ghana Club 100 list, and was the first Ghanaian caterer to join the UN Global Compact. Its clients include oil and gas multinationals, mining operations and airline companies — environments where the consequences of food safety failures are immediate and severe.

Lindsay-Gamrat built the company from scratch after launching in 2014. She spotted an opportunity when Ghana’s expanding extractive industries were importing their hospitality services rather than sourcing locally. “There was a gap,” she said. “These companies needed catering partners who understood compliance, food safety and operational reliability at the highest level. I had spent 15 years doing and learning exactly that.”

A decade later, she has not only filled that gap but redefined what a Ghanaian catering company can achieve. Atlantic Catering operates across locations from Accra to Takoradi to Ahafo, offering offshore and onshore contract catering, remote site services, facility management and event management. The company sources ingredients directly from smallholder farmers across Ghana, channelling millions of cedis into rural communities annually.

But for Lindsay-Gamrat, business success and social impact are inseparable. “True hospitality goes beyond exceptional food and service,” she reflected. “It’s about caring for people, communities and the planet.”

That philosophy shapes her approach to leadership. Atlantic Catering runs dedicated development programmes for employees, with particular focus on women, including emotional intelligence training and leadership courses. “The only thing more beautiful than a woman is a group of women,” Lindsay-Gamrat said. “I believe in lifting as I climb.”

The Clean Bites initiative is an extension of that ethos — lifting standards across the entire food ecosystem, not just within her own company. Lindsay-Gamrat sees it as both a public health intervention and an investment in Ghana’s food culture.

“Street food is part of who we are as Ghanaians,” she said. “It feeds our workers, our students, our families. If we can make it safer without losing what makes it special, we strengthen something that matters to our daily lives.”

Lindsay-Gamrat holds a degree in Business Administration from the University of Professional Studies, Accra, and a Global Executive MBA from China Europe International Business School. She is now planning to expand Atlantic Catering across Africa, taking her model of combining international standards with local sourcing and community impact to new markets.

“I want Atlantic Catering to become the leading catering brand across the continent,” she said. “But wherever we go, the mission stays the same — excellence for everyone, not just those who can afford multinational prices.”

She acknowledged challenges facing local businesses, including high energy costs and procurement processes that favour foreign firms. But her decade of entrepreneurship has reinforced a conviction: that Ghanaian companies can compete at the highest level while lifting their communities.

From the offshore platforms where a contaminated meal can halt production to the roadside kitchens where a mother buys her children’s dinner, Lindsay-Gamrat is betting that the same standards should apply. Over 1,300 street vendors have now received that training. She intends to reach many more.

“We started by proving that a Ghanaian company could meet international standards,” Lindsay-Gamrat said. “Now we are proving that those standards can benefit everyone.”

The post From offshore platforms to roadside kitchens: How Maud Lindsay-Gamrat is taking food safety to the streets appeared first on The Business & Financial Times.

Read Full Story