IFTA 2026: India has voted. See the winners.

India’s food regulator has told the Supreme Court it will put a red hexagon on the front of packaged foods that are high in sugar, salt or fat. The court has reserved its judgment, and has asked why food companies need a year of voluntary compliance. Here is how the label would work.

Shelves of packaged snacks in a supermarket aisle

What the label will look like

Under the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) proposal, a red hexagon on a white square would sit at the top left of the front of the pack. Inside it would be a plain warning: ‘HIGH FAT’, ‘HIGH SUGAR’, ‘HIGH SALT’ or ‘HIGHLY SWEETENED BEVERAGE’. If a product crosses the limit for two or three nutrients, all of them would be named in the same hexagon.

The text must be at least one point larger than the nutrition table on the back of the pack, and the overall size broadly follows the Canadian model FSSAI says it has adopted. Products, including drinks, that use non-caloric sweeteners may also carry the line ‘CONTAIN NON CALORIC SWEETENER’.

What will get flagged

The big change is the trigger. FSSAI earlier wanted warnings only on products high in two or more nutrients. The petitioner, the NGO 3S and Our Health Society, called this unscientific, and the court asked FSSAI to justify it in a 10 September order. FSSAI’s revised plan flags a product that is high in any one nutrient of concern.

The limits are tied to the Dietary Guidelines for Indians, 2024, published by ICMR’s National Institute of Nutrition. For solid foods, added sugar is set at about 5 per cent of energy and total sugar at no more than 10 per cent. For liquids and beverages, the figures are about 10 per cent for added sugar and up to 30 per cent for total sugar.

How processed a food is will not matter; only its nutrient content will. Naturally occurring sugars in fruit and milk are treated separately from added sugar, and trans fat is left out of the fat calculation because it already has its own limit.

The added-sugar argument

Using added sugar rather than total sugar is the most contested part. Minutes of a June 2021 FSSAI stakeholders’ meeting, reported by The South First, show scientific members then favoured total sugars, noting that ‘added sugar cannot be analytically verified in a laboratory.’

Arun Gupta, convenor of the nutrition advocacy group NAPi, has warned that ‘food companies can easily reformulate products to hide or substitute added sugars’, keeping calories high while dodging the warning. NAPi has also asked for a separate hexagon for each nutrient and bolder text.

Industry pushback, and the evidence

Nestlé, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola oppose the move, according to a Reuters report carried by IANS. In a 24 September submission to the court, the All India Food Processors Association asked for the red colour to be reconsidered, arguing that consumers are used to associating red with the mandatory non-vegetarian mark.

The court has not been sympathetic to arguments that the labels would unfairly hurt traditional Indian packaged snacks. ‘Commercial interests cannot supersede public health imperatives,’ the bench has said.

The petitioner has cited a six-state randomised field experiment with Indian shoppers. With a warning label, 60.8 per cent correctly identified products high in nutrients of concern, against 55 per cent with a numerical table and 45 per cent with a star rating.

Why it will still take time

FSSAI’s plan needs about four months to issue and finalise draft regulations. The draft would then be open for 60 days of comment, at home and on the WTO platform. After notification, food businesses would get a 365-day voluntary period, which FSSAI says is needed to use up pre-printed packaging.

The bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran was unimpressed at the 28 September hearing. It asked why the regulator wanted to ‘waste so much time’ and ‘Why voluntary compliance for a year?’, noting that the process began in 2022, when FSSAI first floated a star-rating label. The court then reserved its judgment. NAPi has called a timeline stretching to July 2028 unreasonable and wants labels in place by 1 July 2027.

What to watch

First, the Supreme Court’s judgment: whether it shortens or scraps the one-year voluntary window. Second, the draft regulation itself, and whether the colour, the added-sugar test or the one-hexagon design changes after comments. Third, the classroom: FSSAI has proposed working with the school education department and CBSE to add nutrition literacy to the curriculum. As FSSAI’s own affidavit put it, ‘symbols alone cannot replace nutritional literacy.’