The Whole Truth no longer claims there is “No Added Sugar” in its chocolate bars. Instead, in a sudden effort to live up to its name, the packaged food company has replaced those words with the more specific “Sweetened with Dates”.
Similarly, MasterChow has removed the words “100% Natural” and “healthy” from its ramen packaging.
The Whole Truth and MasterChow are not alone. Over the past few months, words have begun disappearing from food packs and associated material across the industry.
Marketing teams have been busy rewriting website copy, reviewing advertisements and sending product labels back to lawyers before they go to print.
The catalyst is a regulator that has become far more active. Over the past few months, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has issued notices to dozens of food and wellness brands, including direct-to-consumer companies such as The Health Factory and Troovy, questioning health and nutrition claims on products ranging from protein-rich foods to electrolyte drinks.
In a notice sent to Heritage Foods, the regulator said, “The claim ‘Fresh Paneer’ does not satisfy the conditions stipulated under Schedule V for the use of the term ‘Fresh’. Accordingly, the use of the word ‘Fresh’ is liable to mislead consumers and is considered misleading.”
FSSAI also said use of the word ‘Healthy’ in the trademark ‘Healthy Happiness,’ which Heritage Foods uses as its tagline, does not comply with FSSAI regulations. “The use of the term is likely to create the impression that the product inherently promotes or enhances health, thereby rendering the claim misleading,” the regulator said.
The regulator’s recent notice to Cipzer Nutraceuticals over claims on its juice capsules has also drawn attention to another commonly used marketing term: FSSAI Approved. The term appears on the packaging and websites of several food brands, even though FSSAI does not specifically endorse individual food products. The phrase, however, leads gullible shoppers into believing a product has received a governmental seal of approval.
While regulatory notices are not new, founders and compliance experts say the latest action has sent a message well beyond the companies that received them.
The timing is significant. India’s wellness food market has exploded over the past five years, giving rise to brands such as The Whole Truth, Yoga Bar, Eat Better, Daily Punch, and The Func Lab. They built businesses around the promise that packaged food could also be healthy, charged a premium, and tapped into India’s fast-growing wellness market, estimated to be worth more than $60 billion, according to Grand View Research. The words on the pack became as important as the ingredients inside.
Labels matter because consumers pay attention to them, say experts. In a Mint survey of about 50 respondents, 90% said they had bought a packaged food product because of a health claim on the label. Most said they purchase such ‘better-for-you’ foods regularly, and nearly two-thirds said they would be less likely to buy the product if those claims disappeared.
Now, every claim is being examined more closely than before. Founders say the question is no longer simply whether a claim will appeal to consumers, but whether it will withstand regulatory scrutiny.
The change is also playing out in the offices of regulatory consultants. “Five categories dominate almost every conversation we have today,” says Ashwin Bhadri, founder and chief executive of Equinox Labs, an air, water and food testing laboratory. “Claims around ‘no added sugar,’ ‘zero sugar,’ ‘naturally sweet’ and ‘no refined sugar’ top the list. Then come ‘high protein,’ ‘natural,’ ‘clean label’, organic claims, and gut health and immunity.”
The regulator bares its teeth
In 2024, Mint examined whether India’s food regulator was doing enough to protect consumers amid controversies around infant food, spices and misleading labels. At the time, the questions centred on a regulator that was often seen as reactive, with limited public disclosure and patchy enforcement. Today, the conversation has shifted. The recent notices to wellness brands suggest the FSSAI is taking a far more assertive approach to policing health and nutrition claims.
While the Food Safety and Standards Act came into force in 2006, two key regulations introduced over the past decade have reshaped how food companies communicate with consumers: the Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018, which govern the use of health, nutrition and functional claims in food marketing; and the Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations, 2020, which prescribe how information must be presented on food packaging.
“Many of the products under scrutiny today have existed in India for decades. They are not new products,” says Rishi Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of TeamLease RegTech, a compliance management software company. “What has changed is the regulation, and now the regulator has started cracking the whip on claims. Everybody is waking up.”
FSSAI has also become far more capable in enforcing the rulebook. Over the past few years, it has expanded risk-based inspections, stepped up food sample testing, and increasingly uses digital tools to monitor e-commerce listings, advertisements and product labels. Financial penalties surged from ₹10.9 crore a decade ago to ₹154.9 crore in 2025–26 as inspections, food recalls, and criminal convictions increased.
The change is forcing companies to rethink how products are built and marketed. “Earlier, product launches were managed by product teams. Today, marketing, advertising and compliance all have to sit at the same table,” Agrawal says. Claims such as “high protein” can be verified through testing, but broader statements around immunity, heart health or wellness often require far greater scrutiny before they appear on a label or advertisement.
FSSAI did not reply to emailed queries.
Behavioural change
MasterChow, which has received a show-cause notice from FSSAI over allegedly misleading claims, says it has streamlined its internal review timelines. “Processes that earlier took close to two weeks have now been optimized to around five days, allowing us to respond much faster to evolving regulatory requirements while ensuring every communication remains compliant,” says Vidur Kataria, founder of the company and a director.
Bread maker The Health Factory said nothing had changed with the product and that it is in discussions with authorities. Other brands that have received notices, including Heritage Foods and Healthy Master, did not respond to Mint’s queries.
Brands that have not received notices say the crackdown has changed behaviour across the industry. About half a dozen founders Mint spoke to said they have gone back to review product labels, packaging and marketing claims, wary that language once considered acceptable could now invite regulatory scrutiny.
“We’ve become more conservative about the language we use, preferring evidence-backed statements over broad wellness claims,” says Sahil Kukreja, co-founder of nutrition brand The Func Lab. “While we’ve generally taken a cautious approach, we acknowledge there were areas where our communication could have been clearer, and we’ve proactively worked to improve them.”
Others say the changes are subtle but deliberate. “We are refining our product messaging to place greater emphasis on ingredient quality, nutritional transparency and accurate labelling,” says Chandan Kumar, CEO and co-founder of health-focused food brand Daily Punch.
The shift is visible even in how brands describe ingredients. When Nutty Gritties launched its Daily Date snack, which contains dates and honey, founder Dinika Bhatia says the company consciously chose to label it as having “No Added Refined Sugar” instead of “No Added Sugar”, a broader claim. “The broader claim may have been more attractive from a marketing perspective, but we believed the more specific claim was a more accurate and transparent representation of the product,” she says.
Date-based sweeteners are not harmful when consumed as part of a balanced diet, but it is important to remember that they still contribute to the total carbohydrate content of a product, says Dnyaneshwari Barve, who is in charge of the nutrition and dietetics department at DPU Superspecialty Hospital, Pimpri, Pune. “Consumers should be aware that using dates as a natural sweetening ingredient does not necessarily mean the product is free from sugars or carbohydrates,” she adds.
Barve also cites ‘cholesterol-free’ claims on edible oils as a common example of potentially misleading marketing. Since cholesterol is found only in animal-derived foods, vegetable oils are naturally cholesterol-free, making such claims potentially misleading to consumers, she explains.
In some cases, companies have had to alter products to keep pace with evolving regulations. Usha Kamat, technical head of regulatory affairs and quality at nutrition brand Fast&Up India, says the company changed one of its electrolyte products after FSSAI withdrew permissions allowing food companies to use the term “ORS” in brand names. Since ORS is associated with the World Health Organization’s formulation for oral rehydration salts, its use on general electrolyte drinks could be considered misleading.
Behind these changes lies a more fundamental shift in how compliance itself is viewed. Industry executives say FSSAI’s enforcement has become faster and more sophisticated, aided by digital tools such as the Food Safety Compliance System (FoSCoS), which allows regulators to monitor product licences, labels, ingredients, ecommerce listings and advertisements more efficiently.
That has forced companies to invest more heavily in regulatory processes and compliance has become a bigger line item in their budgets. Besides routine laboratory testing, brands are spending more on packaging reviews, scientific validation, documentation, employee training and quality checks to ensure products remain compliant throughout their shelf life.
“We have increased our investment in regulatory compliance by around 10–20% over the past year,” Daily Punch’s Kumar says. The additional spending has gone towards laboratory testing, packaging reviews, regulatory documentation and compliance support, he adds.
The increase has been sharper for some companies. Kukreja says The Func Lab now spends ₹50–70 lakh annually on testing, scientific validation, regulatory compliance and quality assurance, compared with the ₹10–20 lakh that many emerging wellness brands typically spent a few years ago. Fast&Up, too, has increased its compliance budget by 30–40% over the last year, claims Kamat.
The compliance rush
The regulator’s tougher stance has also triggered a surge in demand for compliance agencies, testing laboratories and food lawyers, as brands scramble to review products.
Equinox Labs, which tests food products and advises companies on regulatory compliance, says requests for label reviews jumped by about 40% in the three months following FSSAI’s recent enforcement actions. BettrLabs, an AI-driven compliance platform, says more than 50 brands signed up over the past month to validate their product portfolios against FSSAI norms.
But it is not just the volume of work that has changed. It is the stage at which companies are seeking help. “A year ago, most requests were transactional. Brands would send us a product for testing and we'd return a report,” says Ashwin Bhadri, founder and chief executive of Equinox Labs. “Today, many of them come to us before a product is launched, asking us to review labels and claims before the packaging goes to print.”
The shift is most visible among larger food companies, which are auditing entire product portfolios rather than just products under scrutiny. If one ‘no added sugar’ claim is questioned, companies now assume similar claims across other products could also come under the regulator’s lens. Many mid-sized wellness brands, meanwhile, are pursuing a two-pronged strategy by engaging lawyers to review existing claims while commissioning fresh laboratory tests to substantiate the ones they want to retain.
The questions brands are asking have also changed. Ravinkumar Sivalingam, co-founder of BettrLabs, says companies are increasingly worried about risks they may have overlooked, from claims that were once considered standard industry language to inconsistencies between production batches that could make label declarations inaccurate. At the same time, they are looking for ways to strengthen compliance without slowing product launches, he adds.
The legal stakes
An FSSAI notice is not, by itself, a finding of wrongdoing. Companies have the opportunity to respond with scientific evidence, supporting documents and legal submissions before any action is taken.
“If an adverse order is passed, statutory remedies, including appeals, are available,” says Sonam Chandwani, managing partner at KS Legal & Associates. “However, failure to respond or comply can result in penalties, product recalls, suspension or cancellation of licences and, in appropriate cases, prosecution.”
While there are not many publicly documented examples of companies successfully contesting FSSAI action on misleading health or nutrition claims, Nestlé’s challenge to the 2015 Maggi ban remains a notable exception. The Bombay High Court quashed FSSAI’s order, but largely on procedural grounds, holding that the regulator had not followed due process and directing fresh testing of the products.
The legal exposure may also extend beyond food regulations. Depending on the nature of the claim, companies can face proceedings under the Consumer Protection Act for unfair trade practices or complaints before the Advertising Standards Council of India over misleading advertisements.
The Central Consumer Protection Authority (India) has the power to impose a penalty up to ₹10 lakh for a first violation, and up to ₹50 lakh for repeat violations, according to Karun Mehta, Partner at Khaitan & Co. ASCI cannot prosecute companies, but can request them to remove or modify advertisements that violate its advertising code, he adds.
Lawyers say claims around immunity, weight loss, diabetes management, heart health, anti-ageing and disease prevention remain among the most vulnerable because they often require a higher standard of scientific substantiation.
Industry experts believe the regulator is also becoming less willing to accept superficial corrections. Equinox Labs’ Bhadri pointed to FSSAI’s March 2024 review meeting, where 136 of the 163 products examined had been flagged previously for compliance gaps. “That tells us the existing model of issuing a notice, allowing voluntary correction and closing the matter, hasn’t led to lasting behavioural change,” he says. “The direction of enforcement now suggests the regulator wants the consequences of non-compliance to be more immediate and more visible.”
For consumers, the labels on supermarket shelves may soon look different, where marketing-friendly words such as ‘healthy’, ‘natural’ and ‘no added sugar’ could become less common, and be replaced by more specific, evidence-backed descriptions. But that may not lower grocery bills. As brands spend more on testing, scientific validation and regulatory compliance, some of those costs could eventually be passed on to consumers. Larger companies are likely to absorb much of the cost, whereas smaller businesses may need to invest more carefully, according to Dhruv Tomar, founder, Paper Pro, a dairy-tech startup that helps detect milk adulteration.
But the trade-off may be worth it. In the Mint survey cited earlier, nearly two-thirds of the respondents said they assumed claims such as ‘healthy’ or ‘gut-friendly’ had already been vetted by regulators. If FSSAI’s crackdown succeeds, that assumption may no longer be misplaced.
Over the years, such terms have often been used without consistent scientific backing, which can create unrealistic expectations among consumers, says Tomar. “FSSAI’s action reinforces the need for claims to be evidence-based and compliant with regulations. It also reminds consumers that marketing statements should not replace informed decision-making.”