Over the years, I have noticed something about conversations around food adulteration. They usually begin with a question: What is being adulterated now? Milk, spices, oil, paneer, sweets.
The list keeps changing depending on what has been found, where it has been found, and what happens to be in the news that week. But after spending more than two decades working around food testing, audits, and food businesses, I think there is a more useful way of looking at the problem. It is not enough to ask which food is being adulterated. We need to understand which parts of the food chain make a product vulnerable in the first place.
Milk is a good example. It is one of the most routinely consumed foods in the country, yet what reaches a household has already travelled through several hands and processes. Collection, transportation, storage, processing, and distribution can all affect quality. Adulteration is one concern. Microbial quality, composition, and other safety parameters are separate concerns that also need attention.
A product can have no obvious sign of adulteration and still fail a laboratory test for a different reason. Spices present another challenge because consumers tend to judge them visually. We see the colour of turmeric. We smell the chilli powder. We look at the texture of coriander powder. But a consumer cannot see every contaminant, microbial issue, or form of substitution that testing may reveal.
This is one reason spices have repeatedly come under regulatory and surveillance attention. FSSAI's enforcement work has covered commonly consumed spices, including chilli, turmeric, coriander, cumin, and black pepper, with testing against prescribed quality and safety parameters.
There is a similar problem with edible oils. Most of us buy oil in a sealed bottle and assume the packaging tells us what is inside. In many cases, that is a reasonable assumption. But determining whether an oil meets its required composition and quality standards can involve analytical testing that has nothing to do with what the oil looks like when it is poured into a pan.
This is where I think our understanding of adulteration needs to become a little more mature. Not every food-safety failure is deliberate adulteration. Not every non-compliance is the result of someone trying to cheat. And not every problem can be solved by conducting more raids. Sometimes the weakness is much earlier in the chain.
A supplier may not have adequate controls. A storage condition may not be maintained. A business may be relying on paperwork instead of verification. A raw material may change from one source to another without the level of testing changing with it.
These are less dramatic stories than a raid, but they are often closer to where food safety is actually built or lost. That is also why I am cautious when someone asks me to name India's single biggest adulteration risk. The risk does not stay fixed.
It can vary by commodity, geography, season, sourcing pattern and the number of hands involved before a product reaches the consumer. Milk has its vulnerabilities. Spices have theirs. Oils have theirs. The answer, therefore, cannot simply be another list of foods consumers should be suspicious of. What we need is better visibility into the points where a food business can lose control of quality, followed by testing that actually checks those points.
Testing is not a substitute for a good food-safety system. It is one of the ways a business finds out whether that system is working in practice. That distinction has stayed with me throughout my work. A raid may uncover a problem. A test may identify it. But the real measure of food safety is what happens after that.
Does the business understand why it happened? Does it correct the process? Does it check the same risk again? Does the supplier get evaluated? Does the problem disappear from the next batch?
Those questions rarely make headlines because the milk in our refrigerator, the spices in our kitchen and the oil beside our stove are not isolated products. They are the final outcome of everything that happened before they reached us. And food safety depends on getting that journey right.
(The author is CEO at Equinox Labs)