India’s food regulator flagged over 160 misleading claims. Years later, 120 are still around

In 2021, Britannia launched a new version of its waffle-shaped Milk Bikis biscuit. The company claimed it was made of “100% atta” and had “doodh roti ki shakti”, or the energy of milk and roti.

The company’s claim that the factory-manufactured biscuit was as wholesome as wheat rotis and milk ran into trouble with India’s food safety regulator.

In January 2024, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India issued a notice to the company, seeking justification for these claims, which it stated, “seems misleading” and “should be withdrawn”.

The company responded to the regulator’s notice. But when the matter came up for discussion again in November, the food regulator rejected the justification, documents obtained through a Right to Information application show.

The regulator noted that the label was making an unacceptable comparison between “processed food” and “freshly cooked food”. It stated, “The claim of Dudh Roti ki Shakti cannot be accepted and is misleading.”

In February 2024, the company sent “revised artwork” of the label to the regulator. But the changes, too, did not satisfy the regulator – the documents note that in a March 2024 meeting, the regulator found the revised label “unsatisfactory” and directed an official to ensure that the company “shall mandatorily remove the claim”.

Two years later, however, in April 2026, we found that the biscuit was still being sold with the same packaging on e-commerce websites.

We placed an order on Amazon – the packet that was delivered featured the tagline “doodh roti ki shakti”. Britannia responded to queries from Scroll, stating that the matter is “of confidential nature and meant for exchange between the organisation and FSSAI alone”. Further, it stated that the cases had “all been successfully closed with full compliance from the brand”.

The FSSAI did not respond to Scroll’s queries.

This is not the only case in which claims that the food safety regulator flagged as misleading continue to be in circulation.

The documents Scroll accessed contain information about 163 cases, the earliest from 2022, which were discussed in a meeting held by the Food Safety and Standards Authority in March 2024.

Our analysis found that most of these products continue to be sold with the same claims that the regulator had flagged as being misleading. These include products from Britannia, Dabur and Patanjali, among other fast moving consumer goods giants.

While regulations set out a time frame of a maximum of 165 days within which concerns about a product’s claims must be resolved after they are first raised, several companies continued to make allegedly misleading claims years after the food regulator had flagged them.

This dramatically low rate of enforcement of food advertisement regulations was even underlined in the Economic Survey of 2026, published in January. In a section on “the challenge of ultra-processed foods”, the survey noted that though there were many regulations in place to prevent misleading food advertisements, enforcement against them “leaves much to be desired”.

Scroll emailed the FSSAI, seeking responses to criticisms that it had not done enough to protect Indian consumers from misleading food claims. This story will be updated if it responds.

---

Unhealthy packaged food is fuelling an epidemic of lifestyle diseases in India. The government knows this. But its measures to regulate the industry are falling short. This series, based on previously unpublished internal documents, takes a hard look at this failure.

---

How the process works

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, which functions under the union health ministry, is responsible for regulating the production and marketing of food in the country.

One of its internal panels, called the advertisement and claims monitoring committee, is tasked with implementing regulations, including those that mandate that all claims made on food products are “truthful, unambiguous, meaningful, not misleading”. Further, any claim of nutritional or health attributes has to be “scientifically substantiated”.

As part of its work, the committee examines food products that appear to have made false or misleading claims. These include products that it identifies itself, as well as those brought to its attention by other entities, such as other food and beverage companies or other arms of the government.

If the committee needs more information, it can seek clarifications from the food business or marketer in question. The firm must send the information within 30 days of receiving the request. The regulator is required to pass an order accepting or rejecting the clarification within 90 days.

But the regulator may also suggest “improvements” to the claim made in the product label or advertisement, which the company is then required to implement within 45 days.

A firm can also be directed to run a corrective advertisement within 30 days of being ordered to do so by the regulator, using the same medium, to “neutralise the effect” of the original advertisement whose claims the regulator flagged.

The regulations allow FSSAI to impose a financial penalty on companies that do not comply with its directions – the maximum amount of this penalty is Rs 10 lakh, a limit that has remained unchanged since the Food Safety and Standards Act was enacted in 2006, and is a fraction of what a large FMCG company can earn from the sales of a product that makes misleading claims.

The regulator can also impose “other stringent punishments” such as suspension or cancellation of a company’s license “in case of repeated offences”.

Despite the public interest inherent in the work it does, the proceedings of the advertisement and claims monitoring committee are not public. There is no information in the public domain about how frequently the committee meets. Nor are there any public disclosures about companies whose food products it has examined and found guilty of making misleading claims, and against which it has taken punitive action.

Rather, the FSSAI’s annual reports only furnish numbers for instances of “labelling defects/misleading claims/others”, without disclosing the names of products and companies in question.

The products flagged

For this report, Scroll reviewed more than 230 pages of documents containing details of the correspondence between the FSSAI’s advertisement and claims monitoring committee and companies whose products were flagged as misleading. The documents, most of which emerged out of a meeting held in March 2024, were obtained through a Right to Information request.

Of the 163 products that were examined in the March 2024 meeting, 136 had been flagged earlier for making misleading claims, like Milk Bikis. In these cases, the regulator had already issued improvement notices to the companies.

Issued under Section 32 of the Food Safety and Standards Act, a notice is the first sign that the regulator has found a company’s claims about a product to be in violation of regulations. The company in question is expected to take remedial measures within a stipulated period or face a penalty and even suspension of its licence.

Another three cases pertained to Dabur Real juice products. In the March 2024 meeting, the regulator flagged them as being of potential concern. Since then, it has explicitly stated in a petition in a court case in the Delhi High Court that it considers claims made about the products misleading. Dabur has contested this in court.

Of these 139 products, 120 continue to be sold with the same claims that had been flagged as misleading. In this report, we examine a representative list of cases, across different product ranges.

In the March 2024 meeting, the regulator also discussed another 24 products for which it has not publicly released any further findings.

There were only two instances recorded in the documents of companies taking down misleading claims – in only these did the regulator recommend closure of the cases.

To obtain more information about the cases listed in the documents, and how they had progressed since March 2024, Scroll filed a right-to-information request in February, seeking copies of the minutes of the meetings of the committee held from January 2023 onwards, and for copies of its action taken reports.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority rejected the request by citing two clauses of the transparency law that allow information to be withheld if it is related to “commercial confidence”, “trade secrets”, or “intellectual property” and data held in a “fiduciary” capacity.

While the act allows public authorities to hold back information on these grounds, it maintains that the information can be divulged if the authority is convinced of its “larger public interest”.

We emailed the food regulator on May 26 to ask why it considers information on how it dealt with food claims flagged as misleading to not be in the public interest. This story will be updated if we receive a response.

After our right-to-information request was rejected, we also emailed the regulator specifically asking for information on the products that it had discussed in March 2024. We followed up with the regulator twice, but did not receive a response.

It has also similarly stonewalled others. Earlier, in May 2024, a food activist had filed a right-to-information request, asking the FSSAI to share details of the companies whose licenses had been revoked for violating food advertisements regulations. In response, the regulator had said that “no such information is available”.

Claims about juices

Among the major companies whose products appear in the documents is Dabur. The document shows that FSSAI officials flagged different products from Dabur’s Real range of juices twice over seven months – first in November 2023, and then again in the March 2024 meeting.

In November 2023, the regulator noted that the company’s statements about the composition of its mixed fruit juice seemed to be “ambiguous”, and that its claims about “health and sehat” were “misleading” and violative of regulations. It directed officials to “close the matter at the earliest”.

But the same juice – along with grape and apple juices – was examined again in 2024. In each case, the regulator noted that the company’s claims that the products were “100% juice” were misleading, since they were made from concentrates ranging in percentages from between 6.80% and 22%.

Minutes of the March 2024 meeting show that the regulator decided to put the case before a scientific panel the following month. The authority recommended that after receiving comments from the panel, officials should meet and seek clarification from Dabur “before initiating action”.

The regulator also took note of the fact that the juicebox carried the disclaimer that “Real” was only a “trademark and does not represent its true nature” at the back of the pack. But it pointed out that when a product used terms like “natural” and “real”, companies were required to carry such disclaimers at the front of the packet.

Scroll bought a box of Real juice from a retail store and found that the packaging did not carry the disclaimer at all. On e-commerce websites, products continued to be described as “100% juice”.

Indeed, the most widespread violation identified across the database involved the misuse of terms such as “natural” and “pure” to describe products. The committee repeatedly noted that such claims violated the Food Safety and Standards (Advertising & Claims) Regulations, 2018, which restricted the use of these terms – the term “pure”, for instance, can only be used for “a single-ingredient food to which nothing has been added”.

In fact, three months after the March 2024 meeting, the FSSAI issued a broad directive stating that there was “no provision” under the law for companies to claim they sold “100% Fruit Juice”. Further, it noted that they were not permitted to use the term “100%” when fruit juices were “reconstituted using water and fruit concentrates/pulp”.

Ten months later, Dabur India challenged this directive in the Delhi High Court, arguing that it was “legally unsound”. While the regulator’s objections had thus far been confined to internal documents, now, in court, the FSSAI stated that Dabur’s claims that its products were “100% juice” were “misleading”.

The next hearing in the case is on July 13.

In parallel to this case, a disclosure by the company to the National Stock Exchange revealed additional legal problems. The document noted that the additional district magistrate of Almora had on April 10 fined the company Rs 4 lakh over a product label that violated the food safety law. The company did not specify which product the case pertained to, but said it would appeal the penalty.

Scroll emailed Dabur, seeking its comments on the FSSAI’s findings. This story will be updated if the company responds.

Britannia flagged, not only for biscuits

Britannia did not come under the regulator’s scrutiny only for its Milk Bikis biscuits.

The regulator noted that Britannia’s 100% Wheat Bread “is not complying the standard of Whole wheat bread”. It pointed out that under the regulations, bread could only be described as “whole wheat” if it contained a minimum of 75% of whole wheat flour. The Britannia product falls short of this proportion, and contains only 62.5% whole wheat flour.

Officials first flagged the product in August 2023. In October 2023, they issued an improvement notice, and in the next month rejected Britannia’s response, noting that it was “unsatisfactory”. It then issued a “show cause notice” to the company.

Scroll’s queries to Britannia included queries about the notices it received about its wholewheat bread. The company did not respond separately to queries about different products, only stating broadly that the matters were “of confidential nature and meant for exchange between the organisation and FSSAI alone”. Additionally, it noted in the general response that the cases had “all been successfully closed with full compliance from the brand”.

In April 2026, Scroll purchased a packet of the bread and found that it still claimed to be “100% wholewheat bread”, even though, according to its label, it contained 62.5% whole wheat flour. On e-commerce platforms, too, we found the product listed with less than the mandated percentage of wholewheat flour.

Concerns over gummies

Among the categories of products that the regulator flagged were gummies, which companies claim impart a variety of benefits. In August 2023, officials scrutinised Tata 1mg’s Biotin Gummies. They came to a categorical conclusion about its composition: “The claim ‘Health gummies with non-caloric sweetener stevia’ is misleading since the product also contains sugar along with stevia.”

FSSAI officials also raised concerns about the product’s use of the word “healthy”. They noted that this was “misleading” and in violation of food safety regulations, which stipulate: “Food shall not be described as ‘healthy’ or represented in a manner that implies that a food in and of itself will impart health.”

Scroll found that the product is listed on Tata 1mg’s own platform, still described as containing the “non calorie sweetener Stevia” – its list of ingredients still included sugar.

Further, the words “healthy” and “health” appeared multiple times on the product page. Scroll emailed Tata 1mg, seeking its responses on the FSSAI’s findings. This story will be updated if it responds.

The vegan question

The regulator also flagged numerous companies for claims they made pertaining to products labelled as vegan.

In all, the document showed that more than 20 products market themselves as “vegan” without procuring the mandatory vegan certification from FSSAI, or displaying the required FSSAI vegan logo on physical packaging. These included an unsweetened almond beverage made by Epigamia, a Brooklyn Creamery dessert and almond milk made by Raw Pressery.

As of the March 2024 meeting, none of these cases had reached a conclusion – rather, the food safety regulator directed officials to take “suitable” and “necessary” action in them. Ahead of publishing this story, Scroll found these products still available online, with their claims of being vegan intact.

Also among the products that were flagged was Nourcery’s coconut milk powder. FSSAI officials noted that the product’s label of “vegan” was “misleading” because it “contains Milk protein in it as per the information provided on the label”. FSSAI officials called on the licensing authority to take “suitable action” – but the case remained “under process” 132 days after the regulator issued an improvement notice to the company.

The powder is still sold as a vegan product on its own website and Amazon.

Numerous other products were also flagged for claiming to be vegan without the mandatory FSSAI approval. These included Alt Co’s oat milk, soy milk and almond milk, Drupe’s almond milk, HealthSetGo’s Relax Gummies, One Good’s Cashew Mylk, Sana Vegan’s plant paneer, chicken and meat substitutes from Vezlay, and Tata 1mg’s Biotin gummies.

Scroll found all these products still available on the companies’ websites or e-commerce websites, with the claim intact. We emailed the companies whose products the FSSAI had flagged. One Good responded that all their products were “100% plant-based” and “carry the required FSSAI license details and relevant regulatory markings on the packaging”. This story will be updated if we receive any other responses.

Products that claimed health benefits

The regulator’s most grave concerns pertained to products that made claims of providing medical and therapeutic benefits and advantages. Among these were products that claimed to prevent breast cancer, and others that claimed to treat diabetes, kidney diseases, urinary tract infections and insomnia. They also included products that made claims of being sugar-free.

In all, Scroll identified more than 20 products that had been flagged for such concerns.

Among them was Patanjali’s honey, about which the regulator received a complaint from the Central Consumer Protection Authority, a consumer rights-enforcement body under the union department of consumer affairs. The claims committee discussed the matter in December 2023 – it determined that justification should be sought from the company for claims it made, such as that the honey “scores 100% on more than 100 parameters of purity”, and that it “Can be taken along with juice of ginger for cough relief and for other ailments.” As of March 2024, the matter remained unresolved.

At the time of publishing this story, on its own website and e-commerce websites, the company continued to make the claims that had been flagged by the authority, two-and-a-half years after the FSSAI committee first probed the claims.

This was not the only Patanjali group product that the regulator flagged for claims related to managing sugar levels. In September 2022, FSSAI officials flagged the entire range of the group’s Nutrela Nutrition products. The regulator sought justification from the company for a variety of claims it made about the products, including that they helped improve insulin sensitivity, helped with weight reduction, and hunger and sugar craving management.

The regulator also stated that claims “related to organic on all the products is misleading,” because none of them carried the mandatory certification. They also termed “misleading” the claims, “No doping ingredient and banned substance free”, and directed the company to have them removed.

The minutes of the March 2024 meeting note that after these concerns were raised, the regulator extended a “final hearing opportunity” to the company – despite the fact that regulations do not provide for any such extensions.

As of April 2026, some of these claims persist, both on e-commerce platforms and on Nutrela Nutrition’s website, even though these products are no longer described as “organic” on the company’s website. Scroll emailed the company, seeking its responses to these concerns. This story will be updated if the company responds.

Products flagged for potentially misleading health claims also included Purifry, a product made by D Technology that is added to cooking oil, and which the company claims “acts like a sponge for harmful contaminants – making your cooking oil cleaner and better for reuse”. The regulator flagged the company for claims that the product reduces substances in oil that cause cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure and acidity.

Scroll emailed the company at the end of May about the claims and the FSSAI notification.When we checked the product’s website on June 1, it still made these claims. The same day, however, the company responded that it had “not made any claim of reducing the risk of any disease. We have mentioned it reduces the intake of Free Fatty acids and Peroxides which cause heart disease”.

It added, however, that the phrasing “may be interpreted as a claim” and thus that it had “updated the wordings of the same with immediate effect”. By the end of the first week of June, the claims had been removed from the website.

Three products of the company Indian Chai were flagged for claims including that they helped tackle diabetes and insomnia, and improved the function of organs such as the liver and kidneys. In all these cases, the regulator recommended that officials “close the matter” after taking “suitable action” against the company. Scroll found that the company still made these claims about its products on its website and e-commerce websites.

Indian Chai, in a response to Scroll, said their “products are marketed as traditional herbal and wellness infusions based on commonly known Ayurvedic ingredients and practices. We do not intend to position these products as medicines or as substitutes for medical treatment.” Further, the “product labels carry a disclaimer stating that the information provided has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and that the product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease”.

‘Sugar-free’ claims

A large number of cases pertained to products that claimed to be sugar-free, or promised to help tackle diabetes.

For instance, the regulator flagged the entire “sugar-free” catalogue of Anand Sweets, a Bengaluru-based sweets-maker and seller. The committee alleged that each of these items used sugar substitutes that disqualified them from claiming that they were “sugar-free”. It directed officials to initiate “suitable action”.

In a response to Scroll, Anand Sweets said that it took the FSSAI’s “feedback seriously and are actively reviewing and modifying the packaging labels, website descriptions, and marketing claims for the specified products. We are working to ensure that all ingredient disclosures and product descriptors strictly conform to the updated FSSAI guidelines on sugar substitutes and sweeteners”.

In the case of Medinutrica’s Sugartone Anti-Diabetic Tea Powder, the regulator noted in September 2023 that the manufacturing unit “had been closed” and that “the license has been surrendered”. But it then observed that the product was still available on Amazon. Three years after the unit was said to have been closed, Scroll found the product still available on at least one e-commerce platform.

One ad, for a herbal capsule made by a company named Sheopal’s, which claimed to control diabetes, shows an elderly man eating syrup-drenched gulab jamun. The accompanying text promised that the product would help “balance sugar” and “enhance insulin production”.

The regulator issued an improvement notice to the company in February 2024, and received a response the same month. The regulator then recommended that an official assess the response and “close the matter at the earliest”. It noted further that the claim that the product was natural was “still mentioned” on websites selling it. Scroll found that the company continued to make these claims on its website.

Other companies

The products detailed in this report are illustrative examples. A longer list of several of the companies that the FSSAI flagged for making misleading claims can be seen here in this table. Scroll found that all these claims can still be found on the companies’ websites or e-commerce platforms.

Only in a few cases did the companies respond to Scroll’s request for comment. The comments have been summarised in the table, which will be updated if we receive more responses.

In the third part of this series, we investigate concerns that the FSSAI raised over one of India’s best known beverage mixes.

Read the full series here.