The Wire: India Is Delaying Front-of-Pack Food Labels – and Consumers Are Paying the Price
24 July 2026The FSSAI has gone back on its own plans to introduce regulation around this – and that proposed regulation too was seen as going easy on the packaged food industry.
New Delhi/Pune: Since her ten-year-old daughter was diagnosed with one of the most severe forms of diabetes in 2018, Supriya Shonu, a 40-year-old entrepreneur from Pune, always carries a glucometer, a chocolate bar, fast-acting insulin and an ice-pack.
Her daughter’s illness has brought her back to her high-school curriculum. “It’s math! Today a parent [like me] has to do a lot of math and still fail,” she tells us at a diabetes community meeting in one of Pune’s parks.
She recounts how she has to carefully calculate the amount of salt, sugar or fat of every food item she purchases, using the Nutrition Information Panel on the back that provides details of calories, fat, sugar, sodium, protein, and carbohydrates per 100 grams or per serving.
“It’s not an easy read,” says Supriya, who has a simple request to the authorities.
“Make our lives easier. It should not take us 20 minutes to decide what is good for us. Why don’t you put ‘not fit for high BP’, ‘not good for diabetic’? At least provide access to better information about that product, and then we can decide.”
Supriya’s situation is far from unique. In India nearly one in three women and more than one in four men are overweight or obese, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6, 2023-24). Furthermore, nearly one in five women and more than one in five men were found to have high blood sugar levels.
To respond to challenges like those faced by Supriya, the World Health Organisation identified front-of-pack labelling (FOPL) as one of the most cost-effective public health interventions to manage and prevent non-communicable diseases, enabling people to easily pick healthier products.
A front-of-pack label – FOPL in short – is similar to the nutrition information panel on the back of many packaged products sold in India, but it is located at the front, making it clearly visible. It also makes the nutritional quality of products more immediately legible. There are various approaches to this, including bold warnings where the products exceed recommended intakes in sugar or fat, a star rating with more stars when the products are healthier, or “traffic lights” where red means the product is unhealthy.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has been deliberating an FOPL regulation since 2014, setting up multiple expert panels and public consultations. The FSSAI attributed the slow progress to a lack of consensus among stakeholders, with civil society and the food companies at each end of the debate. The regulation does not appear to be any closer to being implemented, despite the Supreme Court directing the FSSAI to expedite the process after a non-profit organisation’s 2024 plea for urgent implementation.
The Wire, in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports and an international coalition of media partners, traces this long journey as part of a global investigation into how food companies resist public health regulation around the world.
We discovered a total of 239 lawsuits filed between 2010 and 2025 against health policies in six countries: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, United States, United Kingdom, and India. Of the cases brought by private companies where the plaintiff was identifiable, more than one in three came from just nine parent groups, led by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Mondelez.