|
|
|
You can get e-magazine links on WhatsApp. Click here
|
|
|
|
|
|
Label can lie; the food system cannot
|
|
Friday, 11 September, 2026, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
|
|
Ashwin Bhadri
|
For years, consumers have been told that the safest way to make an informed food choice is to read the label. Check the expiry date. Read the ingredients. Look at the nutrition information. Verify the FSSAI licence. It is a routine most shoppers follow almost instinctively before putting a packaged product into their cart.
But what if the label itself cannot be trusted? The recent case involving alleged manipulation of expiry dates and nutritional information on packaged food has exposed a vulnerability that goes far beyond one company or one shipment: what happens when consumers can no longer trust the information printed on the packet?
A food label is supposed to be a consumer's first line of information and, in many cases, the only information available before a purchase is made. When that information is compromised, the issue is about consumer safety, regulatory oversight, and trust in the food system. Food products may leave a perfectly compliant factory and pass through distributors, warehouses, exporters, retailers, and many other hands before finally reaching into the consumer’s hands. But at every stage, there remains an opportunity for something to go wrong.
Not every risk is visible; we often think food safety means testing what is inside the packet. But food safety also means being able to answer basic questions about that packet. Where was it stored? Who handled it? Was the product repacked or relabelled? Was its expiry date changed?
If we cannot answer those questions, we don't have complete traceability. We have documentation, and documentation is not the same thing as control. The risk doesn't end at the factory gate. Food now moves through central warehouses, dark stores, e-commerce platforms, quick-commerce fulfilment centres, third-party logistics providers, and multiple other distribution networks. Food moves through central warehouses, dark stores, e-commerce platforms, quick-commerce fulfilment centres, third-party logistics providers, and multiple other distribution networks. That creates more touchpoints. More touchpoints mean more opportunities for failure. That makes it necessary for food businesses to stop thinking of testing as a one-time compliance activity.
Testing tells us what is present in a sample, and traceability tells us how that product got there. Both matter. Consumers shouldn't have to become investigators. There is also a larger consumer issue here. We tell people to be responsible shoppers. Read the label. Check the date and make informed choices. But the consumer has no practical way of knowing whether that information has been manipulated. They have to trust the system.
That makes trust a food safety issue in its own right. For the consumers to trust the labels, businesses must have systems that make those labels difficult to manipulate and easy to verify. The question businesses should be asking. For too long, the question has been, "Did we pass the test?"
I think the better question is, "Can we prove that this product remained compliant from source to shelf?" That changes the way a company thinks. It means looking at suppliers, storage, transportation, packaging, testing, audits, inventory, and recalls as one connected system. It means identifying where a product is most vulnerable before something goes wrong. And it means being able to trace a problem quickly when it does. Because in food safety, speed matters. If a contaminated or incorrectly labelled batch enters the market, the difference between identifying it in one hour and identifying it in three days can be enormous.
India needs to move from compliance to confidence. Enforcement will always be necessary. Raids will always be necessary. Penalties will always be necessary. But the ultimate measure of a food-safety system should not be how many violations it catches after the fact. It should be how many problems it prevents from reaching consumers in the first place. It requires businesses to know where a product has been, who has handled it, what has happened to it along the way, and whether they can prove it when something goes wrong. And, most importantly, a culture where food safety is treated as an operating responsibility rather than a regulatory obligation.
A label should tell consumers what is in their food. The system behind that label should tell us whether we can trust it because ultimately, the most important ingredient on any food label is one that cannot be printed on the packet: trust.
(The author is CEO at Equinox Labs)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|