India’s food safety regulator has finally put a colour and a shape to years of debate over how packaged food should warn consumers about what’s inside it: red, and hexagonal.
In a compliance affidavit filed before the Supreme Court, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) told the court it has proposed a prominent front-of-pack warning label in red for food products high in added saturated fat, added sugar and salt, according to reports. Products crossing the threshold on two or more of these nutrients would carry the warning in a red-coloured hexagonal shape, with labels reading “HIGH FAT,” “HIGH SUGAR,” “HIGH SALT,” or “HIGHLY SWEETENED BEVERAGE” depending on which limits are breached.
The thresholds themselves aren’t arbitrary — they’re based on the Dietary Guidelines for Indians, 2024, issued by ICMR’s National Institute of Nutrition. To make sure the warning doesn’t get buried in fine print, FSSAI has proposed that it appear in a font size one point larger than whatever is used in the nutrition table on the back of the pack.
Not everything would be covered. The regulator has proposed exempting single-ingredient foods and items that are inherently high in fat, sugar or salt by nature — things like ghee, edible oil, salt, sugar, jaggery and honey — though these would still have to meet other labelling requirements. And crucially, this isn’t happening overnight: FSSAI has proposed rolling out front-of-pack nutrition labelling in phases, to give the industry room to reformulate products and consumers time to get used to the new system.
Why now
This proposal didn’t emerge from routine rule-making — it’s a response to judicial pressure. A petition seeking mandatory front-of-package warning labels on packaged foods has been pending before the Supreme Court, and on August 13, a bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran sharply criticised FSSAI for dragging its feet, questioning at one point whether the government “does not want its people to be healthy.”
That criticism didn’t come out of nowhere. Parliament’s own Standing Committee on Consumer Affairs had already flagged the delay earlier this year: draft norms for front-of-pack labelling were first floated back in September 2022, and by mid-2026 they had been stuck in review for nearly two years despite FSSAI receiving feedback from more than 14,000 stakeholders.
Industry pushback appears to be a big part of why things stalled. A public consultation FSSAI ran in March 2026 reportedly found that most industry associations opposed strong “interpretive” warning labels, preferring a softer, purely informational approach that wouldn’t “create fear” among consumers — a stance the bench reportedly met with scepticism, noting that business interests shouldn’t override consumer rights. One argument raised by the government’s side — that roughly a third of MSME revenue comes from traditional foods likely to attract these warnings — reportedly did not sway the court, which set a firm two-week deadline for FSSAI to act.
The bigger labelling picture
This red-label proposal sits alongside a string of other recent FSSAI moves tightening food labelling generally:
- In 2024, FSSAI approved rules requiring bold, larger-font disclosure of added sugar, salt and saturated fat on the back-of-pack nutrition table — a step short of front-of-pack warnings, but aimed at the same problem.
- A draft Packaging Regulation amendment (2026) is separately in the works to update definitions under the 2018 packaging rules.
- A broader Labelling Amendment 2026, covering infant nutrition labelling, “minimally processed food” definitions, small-pack exemptions and fortification norms, is slated to kick in from July 1, 2027, giving businesses a runway to comply.
What happens next
FSSAI has been explicit that the red-hexagon system is a proposal, not yet law — it would still need to go through formal amendment of the Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations, 2020, including further stakeholder consultation, before becoming mandatory. But with the Supreme Court now setting deadlines rather than just asking questions, the pace of that process looks set to pick up sharply — and the coming weeks may decide whether India ends up with a blunt, symbol-based warning system on the pack, or a more industry-friendly disclosure model.
