On 28 September 2026 a Supreme Court bench asked India’s food regulator a plain question. Why does it need a year of voluntary compliance before warning labels on packaged food become mandatory? The order was reserved and the answer is still awaited. Shoppers will not wait for it. They pick up a packet today and decide in seconds.
The useful information is already on the pack. It sits on the back in small print, written under rules most of us never read. This guide shows how to read food labels in India one part at a time, so the front of the pack stops doing all the talking.
The front of the pack is built to persuade
Natural. High protein. No added sugar. Front panels use short phrases that are easy to trust and hard to check. The back works differently. Ingredient lists, nutrition tables and dates follow set rules, which makes them the fairer way to compare two products.
Reading them takes under a minute once you know what each part means. Start at the front and work backwards.
What the name and the claims must tell you
Under FSSAI’s Labelling and Display Regulations, 2020, the name on the front of the pack must indicate the true nature of the food. A pack must also not be described in a way that is false, misleading or deceptive. A brand or fanciful name is allowed only beside the descriptive name.
There is a useful rule on emphasis. When a pack highlights an ingredient through words, pictures or graphics, its percentage generally has to be disclosed. Flavourings, spices and serving suggestion pictures are among the exceptions. If the wrapper shows fruit or nuts prominently, the ingredient list is where you find out how much of them is inside.
The ingredient list is the real recipe
According to the same regulations, ingredients must be listed in descending order of weight or volume at the time of manufacture. The first few entries therefore make up most of the product. Added water must be declared. Additives appear with their functional class and either their name or INS number.
Two details are easy to miss. Sugar can hide under more than one name, because the rules allow class titles such as Sugar for sucrose and Dextrose or Glucose for dextrose. A compound ingredient that makes up less than 5% of the food also does not need its own components listed, unless they are additives with a technological function. Read the first three ingredients. Then scan the rest for sugar in any form.
Reading the nutrition table without a calculator
As FSSAI’s rules set out, nutrition information is given per 100 g or 100 ml or per single consumption pack, together with the per serve contribution to the Recommended Dietary Allowance. The required values include energy, protein, carbohydrate, total sugars, added sugars, total fat, saturated fat, trans fat and sodium. Some products also declare cholesterol. The panel must state the serving size and the number of servings in the pack.
The per serve percentages use a reference adult diet: 2000 kcal of energy, 67 g of total fat, 22 g of saturated fat, 2 g of trans fat, 50 g of added sugar and 2000 mg of sodium, which equals 5 g of salt. Serving sizes differ between brands, so per 100 g is the fairer basis for comparing two products. Then check the per serve percentage. A serve that supplies 50% of the added sugar reference value holds about 25 g of added sugar. Multiply that by the number of servings you will actually eat.
Symbols, allergens and the boxes people skip
The vegetarian symbol is a green filled circle inside a green square. The non-vegetarian symbol is a brown filled triangle inside a brown square. The rules define non-vegetarian food to exclude milk, milk products and honey. Where egg is the only non-vegetarian ingredient the maker may add a statement to say so.
Allergens sit in a separate statement that begins with Contains. It covers cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, milk, egg, fish, peanuts and tree nuts, soy, and sulphite at 10 mg/kg or more. A May contain line signals possible cross contamination. Foods permitted to contain non-caloric sweeteners carry the declaration Contain non-caloric sweetener. Every label also shows the FSSAI logo and the brand owner’s licence number.
Required details must appear in English or Hindi in Devanagari script. Very small packs are different. Packages with a surface area of 100 square centimetres or less are exempt from the ingredient list and the nutrition information, which must then appear on any multi-unit pack.
Dates: expiry, use by and best before
Labels must carry the date of manufacture or packaging and an Expiry or Use by date, as the regulations require. Best before is optional or additional information. The difference matters. Best before marks the point up to which the food keeps its specific qualities. After that it may still be safe but of lower quality. Use by or Expiry marks the end of the period after which the product may not remain safe and must not be sold.
Check storage conditions too. Where the validity of the date depends on them, such as refrigerating after opening, the label has to say so.
Shopping on an app changes how you read
For e-commerce and other direct selling, the mandatory label information must be provided to the consumer before sale. Batch number and the date fields are the exceptions. Ingredients and nutrition information should therefore be on the listing before you order. A LocalCircles survey reported by Business Today found that 89% of 20,435 respondents wanted warnings displayed on e-commerce and quick-commerce platforms before items are added to the cart.
If a listing leaves out the ingredients or the nutrition table, treat it as a gap and check the pack when it arrives. Information only helps when people can read it at the moment they decide. We make the same argument about screens in our piece on designing products that users trust.
What may change if warning labels arrive
In the same survey, 80% of the 23,516 respondents who answered the question on FSSAI’s proposed two phase system said warnings should apply immediately to any product high in even one of sugar, salt or saturated fat. Only 12% backed the phased approach.
The case itself is still open. On 28 September the Supreme Court reserved its order on mandatory front-of-pack warning labels for packaged foods high in sugar, salt and fat. It also questioned FSSAI’s proposed 365 day voluntary compliance period. No final order had been reported when we published this post. A warning label can flag a product at a glance. It cannot replace the ingredient list or the nutrition table when you need to compare.
The takeaway
A label is only as useful as the habit of reading it. Check that the name matches the ingredients. Read the first three ingredients and hunt for sugar. Compare per 100 g, note the servings per pack and finish with the expiry date. That is ten seconds at the shelf. When you pick up your next packet, which part will you read first?
What it means for teams using AI tools
The image bug drew the attention, but the identity design turned it into an incident. A community forum should not share trust with products that connect to GitHub, Slack and email, yet Hacktron noted that a compromised account could theoretically reach all three.
Connected AI tools make this sharper. A coding agent inherits whatever the account behind it can touch. Our guide to AI agents in production recommends least privilege by default, with each agent holding only the tools and data its task needs and every action logged.
Hacktron makes a wider argument too. Software was long protected by complexity, because even a public bug took rare skill and weeks of work to exploit. AI is compressing that effort, and defenders will have to plan for how quickly a known flaw can become a working attack.
The takeaway
Nothing in this chain was exotic. An image parser missed a backport, an identity setup trusted the wrong place and a developer tool had reach nobody had mapped. Each one sat unnoticed on its own. A new model gave three researchers the speed to line them up in a weekend.
