India Floats One-Go Tougher Food Labels After Court Push — SkimNews
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- India's FSSAI told the Supreme Court it could roll out stricter red warning food labels "in one go" rather than the two-phase plan it proposed last month, effectively tagging products high in any one of three nutrients — added sugar, salt, or saturated fat.
- Justice J.B. Pardiwala pushed the FSSAI during Thursday's hearing, stressing the word "and" and questioning why the earlier plan only labeled products exceeding limits in two of three categories.
- Health activists branded the two-nutrient threshold an "industry-friendly loophole"; nonprofit counsel Rajiv Shankar Dvivedi told Reuters FSSAI must keep the 100-gram benchmark and reject industry's per-serve alternative.
- Reuters reported last month that India's government chose a weaker labeling regime after lobbying by Coca-Cola and groups backing Nestle and PepsiCo, though many of those companies voluntarily use such labels in Europe.
- The All India Food Processors' Association, representing dozens of Indian and foreign food giants including Nestle, Unilever, Mondelez, Mars, ITC and Dabur, argued in court for per-serve labeling and held up a food packet saying "nobody can eat 100 grams of pickle."
- A Lancet study cited at the hearing projected roughly 450 million Indians could be obese or overweight by 2050; the Supreme Court said it was focused on public health, "more particularly growing children."
Why it matters: The shift from a two-nutrient to a one-nutrient trigger would dramatically expand the universe of packaged foods forced to carry a red hexagon, directly threatening product lines from Coca-Cola to ITC and Dabur. With the Lancet projecting 450 million overweight or obese Indians by 2050, the court's impatience could force India's $100 billion food sector to reformulate faster than its phased timetable allowed.
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