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Food label scam that nobody stops
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Saturday, 18 July, 2026, 16 : 00 PM [IST]
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Ashwin Bhadri
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A packet of bread on an Indian supermarket shelf carries the words ‘100% wholewheat bread’ in large type on the front. Turn it over and the ingredient list tells a different story: 62.5 percent whole wheat flour. This is not a hypothetical example. It is Britannia's bread, purchased in April 2026, more than two years after the company received a formal improvement notice from FSSAI's advertisement and claims monitoring committee for exactly this discrepancy.
That detail, uncovered through a Right to Information request and 230 pages of internal regulatory correspondence, is the part of India's food labelling story that rarely makes it into the news cycle. The notices get issued. The headlines get written. And then, in case after case, nothing actually changes on the shelf.
The most recent wave of FSSAI action looks, on the surface, like decisive enforcement. The regulator issued show cause notices to eight food companies in June, expanding to a wider list that included Storia for its pomegranate juice claims, Iota Water for overstated hydration benefits, Healthy Master and Healthy Choice for taglines built around the word healthy attached to basic staples like poha, and four separate companies, Two Brothers Organic Farms, Organic Wisdom, Shine Organic, and World of Organic, for using the regulated term organic in their trade names without holding the certification or the mandatory Jaivik Bharat logo that authentic organic claims require.
FSSAI described the pattern as clean washing, a practice where companies use buzzwords like organic, vegan, zero maida, or healthy to justify a premium price while the actual ingredient list tells a more complicated story.
What makes this latest action different from a routine compliance update is the history sitting behind it. Of 163 products examined in a March 2024 regulatory meeting, 136 had already been flagged previously for the exact same kind of misleading claim, meaning the company had already received an earlier notice, already had the opportunity to correct the issue, and had not done so by the time the next review came around.
Tata 1mg's biotin gummies were flagged in 2023 over a non-caloric sweetener claim the regulator concluded was misleading given the product's actual composition. The case was eventually closed. Two years later, the same packaging, carrying the same tagline, was still being sold on Amazon.
This is the gap that matters more than any individual brand name on a notice list. A show cause notice under Section 32 of the Food Safety and Standards Act is, by design, the first step in a correction process, not the last. It assumes the company receiving it will fix the problem and that the regulator will verify the fix actually happened.
What the documented record shows instead is a pattern where companies respond to inquiries by describing the matter as confidential and stating that it has been closed with full compliance, while the product itself, examined independently months or years later, has not changed at all.
The rules themselves are reasonably clear, he says. A claim needs scientific substantiation, a percentage on a label needs to match what independent testing finds inside the product, and the framework to challenge a violation already exists and gets used regularly. What does not exist with the same consistency is a verification step after a company says it has fixed something, a follow up test that confirms the correction actually happened rather than simply trusting the company's own account of compliance.
A notice that is never followed by independent re-testing is, in practical terms, a conversation rather than an enforcement action, and conversations rarely change what is printed on a wrapper that is already selling well.
The economics behind why this keeps happening are not complicated. A word like healthy or organic or wholewheat on packaging drives a measurable price premium and a measurable sales lift, and the cost of an improvement notice, in the absence of a meaningful fine or a verified follow up inspection, is currently lower than the commercial benefit of simply continuing to use the claim while a slow regulatory correspondence plays out in the background.
The 2026 Economic Survey itself acknowledged this directly, noting in its section on ultra processed foods that while regulations to prevent misleading advertising exist in reasonable number, enforcement against them leaves considerably more to be desired.
What would change the calculation is not a new regulation. India already has the Food Safety and Standards Advertising and Claims Regulations, a structured partnership between FSSAI and the Advertising Standards Council of India to route complaints for review, and penalties that can reach ten lakh rupees per offence.
What is missing is the closing of the loop, an independent test conducted after a company claims it has corrected a violation, not just before the original notice was issued. Without that final verification step, a regulatory notice functions as a paper trail rather than a guarantee that the product on the shelf today is the product the regulator believed it had already corrected.
The consumer holding that bread, reading 100 percent wholewheat on the front and trusting it, has no way of knowing that claim was challenged, addressed, and apparently never actually resolved. That is not a labelling problem anymore. It is an accountability problem, and it will keep producing the same headline, with a different brand name attached, until someone goes back and actually checks.
(The author is founder at Equinox Labs)
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