FSSAI Enforcement in 2026: Labelling Claims, Licence Suspension, Recall and the Appeal Routes That Actually Apply

By Bhaskar Subramanian, Partner, S&S Co. Advocates & Solicitors and Subhradip Roy, Partner, S&S Co. Advocates & Solicitors and Deba Prasad Guha, Food Safety & Regulatory Expert, Advisory Panel, S&S Co. Advocates & Solicitors

Published 24 October 2026 · Law stated as on 21 October 2026 · Informational content, not legal advice: see our disclaimer

Food safety enforcement in India runs on two tracks that are easy to confuse: an administrative track built around the improvement notice, suspension and cancellation of a licence, and a separate penalty track adjudicated under Chapter X of the Act. 2026 has tested both, from a wave of High Court rulings curbing open-ended suspensions to a cluster of interim orders in the Dabur, Britannia, ITC and Red Bull labelling disputes, with the Supreme Court's long-running front-of-pack warning label case still awaiting judgment.

Two tracks of enforcement under the Food Safety and Standards Act

The Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 gives a food business operator two quite different reasons to end up in court, and practitioners who treat them as one problem tend to lose time they cannot get back. The first track is administrative and runs against the licence or registration itself. It begins with an improvement notice under Section 32, can escalate to suspension, and ends, if the operator does not fix what the notice identified, in cancellation. The Designated Officer at district level drives this track, and the remedy against a cancellation or suspension order sits with the Commissioner of Food Safety under Section 32(4)(c).

The second track is penal. Chapter IX of the Act creates specific offences, such as selling misbranded food under Section 52 or carrying on business without a licence under Section 63, and Chapter X hands their adjudication to an Adjudicating Officer appointed under Section 68, who must be an officer not below the rank of Additional District Magistrate. An order from that officer is appealed to the Food Safety Appellate Tribunal under Section 70, and from the Tribunal to the High Court under Section 71(6).

A single inspection can trigger both tracks at once. A restaurant found selling food under unhygienic conditions might face an improvement notice on the licensing side while simultaneously facing a penalty notice for a specific contravention on the adjudication side. The Bombay High Court made exactly this point in the Hotel Alankar matter discussed below: conduct that properly belongs under the penalty provisions should not be stretched to justify open-ended suspension of the licence. Keeping the two tracks separate in correspondence and in pleadings, rather than letting a suspension order quietly absorb what ought to be a penalty question, is often the difference between a short interruption and a prolonged shutdown.

Licensing and registration after the 2026 reform

Section 31 requires every food business other than petty manufacturers and petty retailers, who need only register, to hold a licence before commencing or carrying on business. A 2026 amendment to the licensing framework changed how long that licence or registration lasts, moving from the earlier one to five year validity period to perpetual validity. A licence or registration no longer lapses on a fixed schedule; it continues in force until it is suspended, cancelled or surrendered. Annual regulatory fees still have to be paid, and businesses may prepay for several years at once.

The reform also raised the turnover threshold for basic registration from twelve lakh rupees to one and a half crore rupees, with State licensing generally covering turnover up to fifty crore rupees and Central licensing applying above that figure. Existing operators migrate to the FoSCoS portal without needing a fresh approval and keep their existing licence number. The package is reported to include deemed registration for street vendors and a risk-based inspection framework in place of uniform periodic inspection.

None of this touches the enforcement exposure that is the subject of this article. Perpetual validity removes the administrative risk of letting a renewal date slip, which was itself a recurring source of disputes, but it does nothing to reduce the risk of suspension or cancellation for a hygiene or compliance failure found on inspection. If anything, removing the renewal cycle makes the improvement notice and suspension mechanism the only point at which a licence's continuation is tested, which is likely to sharpen, not soften, the disputes considered in the sections that follow.

The improvement notice: still the first word, usually

Where a Designated Officer has reasonable grounds to believe that a food business operator has failed to comply with the Act's regulations, Section 32 contemplates an improvement notice as the ordinary first step. The notice must set out the particular non-compliance found and the corrective measures required, and the period given for compliance is not ordinarily less than fourteen days. Only if the operator fails to comply within that period does suspension typically follow.

There is, however, an emergency route that bypasses this sequence altogether. The Act allows the authority to suspend or cancel a registration or licence forthwith, without a prior improvement notice, where this is necessary in the interest of public health, provided reasons are recorded in writing. This emergency power is precisely what came under challenge in 2026 in the Dabur, Britannia, ITC and Red Bull disputes discussed later in this article: in each case the operator's central argument was that FSSAI had reached straight for an immediate direction without ever giving it a chance to respond.

Whether an improvement notice is a strict legal precondition to suspension, rather than simply the usual practice that the emergency exception allows the authority to depart from, is not yet settled. In Sanjay Baburao Nirbhavne v. State of Maharashtra, the Bombay High Court quashed an immediate suspension once re-inspection showed the deficiencies had been substantially rectified, but it expressly left open whether an improvement notice must precede immediate suspension as a matter of law. Until an appellate court resolves that question directly, operators facing an abrupt suspension should argue the point on the specific facts, pointing to whatever record exists of prior warnings, inspection scores and correspondence, rather than assuming the answer is settled in their favour.

Suspension and the proportionality line the courts are drawing

Regulation 2.1.8 of the licensing framework lets the authority suspend a registration or licence after giving the operator a reasonable opportunity of being heard and recording reasons. Once suspended, an inspection is ordered to assess compliance, and that inspection is not to take place sooner than fourteen days from the date of suspension, which gives the operator a defined window to correct the defects before being tested again.

The most significant 2026 ruling on what happens next is Hotel Alankar v. State of Maharashtra, decided by a Division Bench of the Bombay High Court's Kolhapur Bench. The licence had been suspended under the proviso to Section 32(3) after a July 2026 inspection recorded a sixty-nine per cent compliance score. A subsequent re-inspection recorded ninety-seven per cent, described as an exemplar level of compliance, yet the appellate authority dismissed the operator's challenge without engaging with that re-inspection report. The High Court held that continued suspension becomes unsustainable once the deficiencies found at the first inspection have been rectified to a satisfactory level, unless the remaining non-compliance poses an immediate and exceptional threat to public health. The Court added a second point of real practical value: breaches such as selling an unendorsed product belong under the penalty provisions in Sections 55 and 63, not under an extended licence suspension, so a Designated Officer cannot use suspension to punish conduct that the Act has already assigned to a different, and more measured, enforcement route.

That decision did not stand alone. In a Division Bench ruling concerning the Park Inn by Radisson hotel in Navi Mumbai, the Bombay High Court set aside a licence suspension and directed a fresh inspection by a committee, holding that suspension should be withdrawn once the operator has rectified the deficiencies or is found within permissible compliance limits. A separate July 2026 ruling quashed a suspension that rested on the discovery of two small insects during inspection, with the Court reportedly urging the regulator toward a more realistic approach to what justifies closing a business down. A Poornima Restaurant petition, filed around the same time on the ground that no improvement notice had been issued before closure, was still pending when these reports were published, so its outcome is not yet confirmed.

Read together, these rulings describe a proportionality principle that is becoming reasonably settled at the level of the Bombay High Court, even if the Supreme Court has not yet pronounced on it: suspension is a tool for securing compliance, not an independent punishment, and once compliance is demonstrated at re-inspection the suspension loses its justification unless the authority can point to an ongoing and exceptional public health risk. Operators outside Maharashtra should treat this as persuasive rather than binding, and should check whether their own High Court has taken a comparable or a different view before relying on it.

Cancellation, the show cause step and the road back

Cancellation sits one step beyond suspension and carries a higher procedural bar. After the post-suspension inspection, if the authority remains of the view that the operator has either failed to rectify the defects identified in the improvement notice or has not complied with the conditions attached to it, cancellation can follow, but only after giving the operator an opportunity to show cause as contemplated by Section 32(3). The grounds for cancellation are, in substance, a continuation of the same defects that justified suspension, now viewed as uncorrected despite the extra time given.

Neither suspension nor cancellation carries any entitlement to compensation or to a refund of fees already paid, a point worth flagging early to a client who may otherwise expect some financial cushion while the business is shut. Cancellation also carries a specific re-entry bar: a fresh licence application cannot ordinarily be made until three months have passed from the date of cancellation, and then only once all the observations recorded in the original improvement notice have been complied with.

That three-month figure matters more in practice than its brevity suggests. A large manufacturer can often absorb a multi-month interruption and litigate the cancellation at leisure. A smaller restaurant, cloud kitchen or regional food business frequently cannot survive even a fraction of that period without staff attrition, lease default or loss of its customer base, which is exactly why the proportionality rulings discussed above carry commercial weight well beyond their legal reasoning. For many operators, winning an interim stay of suspension within days, rather than eventually winning the underlying appeal months later, is the only outcome that saves the business.

Appeal against suspension or cancellation: the Commissioner of Food Safety route

Section 32(4)(c) gives an operator aggrieved by an order of suspension, cancellation or revocation of licence a statutory appeal to the Commissioner of Food Safety, and the Act describes the Commissioner's decision on that appeal as final. This is a distinct forum from the Food Safety Appellate Tribunal considered later in this article, and the distinction is easy to miss because both forums sit within the same Act and both are commonly, if loosely, called an appellate tribunal in conversation. The Commissioner's appeal under Section 32 deals only with licensing action; it has no application to a penalty imposed by an Adjudicating Officer under Chapter X, which follows the separate Section 70 route to the Tribunal.

Because the Act describes the Commissioner's order as final and provides no further statutory appeal from it, an operator who remains dissatisfied has to move the High Court by way of a writ petition under Article 226, arguing that the order is arbitrary, disproportionate, or passed in breach of natural justice. This is precisely the route taken in Hotel Alankar, in Nirbhavne, and in the Park Inn and Poornima matters: each reached the High Court as a writ against the outcome of the Section 32 process, not as a statutory second appeal. Counsel advising an operator at the show cause stage should keep this endpoint in view from the outset, since the record built before the Designated Officer and the Commissioner, including every inspection report, response and re-inspection score, becomes the factual foundation the writ court will later be asked to examine.

What a food label can and cannot say

The Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018 govern what a package or an advertisement may claim about a food product, and they operate through two distinct devices. Regulation 9 permits a set of conditional words, among them natural, fresh, original, traditional and authentic, but only where the claim satisfies conditions set out in Schedule V; FSSAI's own guidance, for instance, treats a claim of freshness as available only where the food has not been processed beyond washing, peeling, chilling, trimming, cutting or other handling needed purely to make it safe for consumption.

Regulation 10 lists claims that are prohibited outright regardless of accuracy. A business may not advertise or make a claim that undermines the products of other manufacturers, may not portray a food as a complete substitute for a normal meal, and may not make a sustainability claim unless some other provision under the Act separately permits it. Disease-risk reduction claims are allowed only where they appear in Schedule III, and only on that limited basis. Terms resembling a claim of home preparation, such as homemade or home cooked, are treated as prohibited outright for a packaged, commercially manufactured product.

Against this framework, FSSAI issued a broad advisory in 2025 asking food businesses generally to discontinue the use of unqualified claims of the type we have, and the disputes considered in the next section are, in large part, the aftermath of that advisory meeting a set of long-established product claims that several large manufacturers were unwilling to abandon without a fight.

The 2026 claims litigation and the front-of-pack warning case: a hearing-first pattern

Four separate disputes dominated FSSAI-related litigation through the middle and later part of 2026, and all four turned, at least at the interim stage, on the same question: did the regulator give the business a chance to respond before acting. In August 2026, FSSAI directed Dabur to immediately stop selling several products, including honey, ghee, edible oils, coconut water and apple cider vinegar, carrying claims such as one hundred per cent pure, on the ground that such claims are ambiguous, unverifiable and likely to mislead consumers under the 2018 Advertising and Claims Regulations. The Delhi High Court, through Justice Amit Mahajan, stayed the direction on the footing that Dabur had made out a prima facie case for relief because the order was passed without any hearing, even though the government's counsel pointed to earlier improvement notices and advisories sent to the company. Dabur's substantive defence, that a one hundred per cent pure claim on a single-ingredient product such as honey cannot by itself breach the Regulations, remains to be decided; the stay rested on the absence of a hearing, not on that argument.

A closely related dispute arose over Britannia's biscuit packaging. FSSAI's order dated 9 October 2026 directed Britannia to remove the claims no added sugar, no maida and no palm oil from its biscuit and cookie labels, taking the view that stating what an ingredient was absent could create the impression that such an ingredient is unsafe or undesirable, and could be read as undermining competing products. On 16 October 2026, the Delhi High Court, again through Justice Amit Mahajan, stayed that order, taking the prima facie view that a true factual statement about which ingredients were used does not, without more, amount to an advertisement that undermines other manufacturers' products or improperly influences consumer behaviour. This interim finding goes a step beyond the Dabur order, since it engages briefly with the substance of Regulation 10 rather than resting solely on the absence of a hearing, although it remains an interim view pending full argument. Separately, and without needing judicial intervention, Britannia agreed to drop a distinct claim of one hundred per cent millets from one product line.

A third dispute concerns ITC's Aashirvaad atta, carrying the claims one hundred per cent atta, one hundred per cent Madhya Pradesh wheat and zero per cent maida. FSSAI's Central Licensing Authority in Kolkata issued an improvement notice on 13 August 2026, following a show cause notice on 10 August, itself following a general advisory of 28 May 2025 against unqualified one hundred per cent claims. The Delhi High Court restrained FSSAI from cancelling ITC's licence pending the next hearing, but the more immediately interesting feature of this dispute is procedural rather than substantive: FSSAI argued the Delhi petition was not maintainable because the improvement notice originated from its Kolkata authority, while ITC argued that its central licence and the location of FSSAI's Chief Executive Officer in Delhi gave the Delhi High Court territorial jurisdiction. That jurisdictional question was, at last report, still to be decided, and it is a reminder that a claims dispute against a nationally licensed manufacturer can turn as much on where the case is filed as on what the label says.

Finally, and running in parallel to all of this, the Supreme Court's long pending front-of-pack warning label litigation, 3S And Our Health Society v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 437 of 2024, remains unresolved. The petition seeks mandatory front-of-pack warnings on packaged food high in sugar, salt or fat. The Court disposed of the petition in April 2025 with a direction to an expert committee following an earlier draft amendment to the Labelling and Display Regulations, revived the matter in February 2026 with a direction to FSSAI to respond within four weeks, and by August 2026 had before it a compliance affidavit proposing red hexagonal warning symbols reading HIGH FAT, HIGH SUGAR, HIGH SALT and HIGHLY SWEETENED BEVERAGE, to be rolled out first for products high in two or more of these attributes before extending to any single attribute. At a hearing reported in late September 2026, the Bench questioned why FSSAI needed a full year of voluntary compliance before enforcement, weighed the Union government's concerns about the impact on micro, small and medium enterprises and on traditional Indian foods, and reserved judgment. No final order had been reported as this article was prepared, so businesses should treat mandatory front-of-pack warnings as imminent in direction but not yet fixed in form or timeline.

Red Bull and the limits of an after-the-fact notice

Red Bull's dispute with FSSAI over its use of the description energy drink followed the same pattern as Dabur, but with a cleaner procedural outcome because FSSAI's own counsel conceded the defect. FSSAI's order of 30 June 2026 directed Red Bull to drop the energy drink descriptor from its labelling. On 29 September 2026, the Delhi High Court, through Justice Amit Mahajan, set aside that order, recording that FSSAI's counsel had admitted no separate show cause notice had been issued to the company before the direction was passed.

The Court was careful to limit what it was deciding. It did not rule on whether Red Bull may continue describing its product as an energy drink; it ruled only that FSSAI had acted without giving the company an opportunity to be heard, and left FSSAI free to take a fresh decision after issuing a proper show cause notice and granting a hearing. Red Bull's substantive defence, built around its use of the descriptor in India since 2002 and what it says was the regulator's earlier recognition of that category of caffeinated beverage, has therefore not yet been tested. A related communication FSSAI sent to state food safety authorities on 17 July 2026, which Red Bull also challenged, appears to stand or fall with the principal order.

The lesson for any operator facing a similar direction is that a procedural victory of this kind buys time, not a final answer. FSSAI remains entitled, and in each of these cases has been expressly invited by the court, to reopen the question properly. The sensible use of the interim period a stay like this creates is to prepare the substantive defence that will be needed when the show cause notice arrives, rather than to treat the stay itself as the end of the matter.

Recall: operator duty and regulatory direction

Section 28(1) places the primary recall obligation on the food business operator itself. Where an operator considers, or has reason to believe, that food it has processed, manufactured or distributed does not comply with the Act or its regulations, it must immediately initiate withdrawal of that food from the market and inform the relevant authorities. A recall is not, in other words, something that only begins once FSSAI orders it; the statutory trigger is the operator's own knowledge or belief of non-compliance.

Recall can equally be directed from outside, by the Chief Executive Officer of FSSAI or by the Commissioner of Food Safety of the relevant State or Union Territory. The Food Safety and Standards (Food Recall Procedure) Regulations, 2017, finalised in January 2017 in the aftermath of the Maggi controversy, were introduced precisely because Section 28 on its own did not lay down a complete process. The Regulations apply to food determined, or prima facie considered, to be unsafe, or otherwise specified by the Food Authority, and Regulation 7 requires every covered food business operator to maintain an up to date recall plan rather than improvising one once a problem surfaces.

FSSAI's own guidance stresses that an operator should halt both distribution and production of the affected product as soon as it becomes aware of the issue, without waiting for a formal direction, and should notify consumers promptly through press releases, advertisements or direct communication as appropriate to the product and its channel of sale. A recurring point of dispute, familiar from related FSSAI enforcement practice, is how far a recall should reach: whether a defect found in one batch justifies withdrawing an entire product line, or whether the finding should be confined to the batch actually tested, is a question that depends heavily on the nature of the defect and the traceability of the affected stock, and it is frequently where an operator's commercial interest in a narrow recall meets the regulator's interest in a cautious, wider one.

Penalty adjudication under Chapter X

Where the issue is not the continuation of a licence but a specific contravention, such as selling misbranded food under Section 52, the Act routes the matter to an Adjudicating Officer under Section 68, who must be an officer not below the rank of Additional District Magistrate for the district, notified by the State Government for this purpose. In fixing the quantum of penalty, the Adjudicating Officer must have due regard to the guiding factors set out in Section 49, which generally look to matters such as the gain made from the contravention and the repetition of the conduct.

Section 68(3) deems all proceedings before the Adjudicating Officer to be judicial proceedings, and this deeming provision has real teeth. A Food Safety Appellate Tribunal in Jammu and Kashmir set aside a penalty of three lakh rupees imposed under Section 52 for misbranding, finding that the Adjudicating Officer's proceedings lacked even basic order sheets and were conducted, in the Tribunal's own description, in a hotchpotch manner, which is inconsistent with the judicial character the Act assigns to the proceeding. An older Allahabad High Court ruling, reported at 2015 (6) ALJ 426, had already established the broader point that both the Adjudicating Officer and the Tribunal, in adjudging the quantum of penalty under Chapter X, exercise only the powers of a civil court, with the consequence that an appeal against the Adjudicating Officer's order under Section 70(1) cannot be filed as a criminal appeal and lies only as a civil miscellaneous appeal.

The Tribunal's jurisdiction is also confined strictly to orders actually passed by a Section 68 officer. A Delhi bench of the Food Safety Appellate Tribunal held that it could not entertain an appeal against an order of the Chief Executive Officer of FSSAI passed under the Food Safety and Standards (Import) Regulations, 2017, because that order had not been passed by an officer constituted under Section 68 at all. An operator wanting to challenge an order of that kind has to look to writ jurisdiction rather than the Tribunal, which makes identifying the correct statutory source of the order under challenge a necessary first step before deciding where to appeal.

Appeal to the Tribunal and beyond: limitation and a forum problem

An appeal from an Adjudicating Officer's order must be filed before the Food Safety Appellate Tribunal within thirty days of receiving the copy of the order, under Section 70, and the Tribunal may condone a further delay of up to thirty days where it is satisfied there was sufficient cause. The Limitation Act, 1963 applies to such appeals except where the Food Safety and Standards Act itself provides otherwise. From the Tribunal, Section 71(6) allows a further appeal to the High Court within sixty days of the Tribunal's order being communicated, with the High Court empowered to allow a further period of up to sixty days on sufficient cause, and the appeal may raise any question of fact or law arising from the Tribunal's order.

Which side of the High Court such an appeal should be filed on is not uniformly settled. A Bombay High Court ruling from its Aurangabad Bench held that because the Tribunal exercises civil jurisdiction, an appeal under Section 71(6) lies on the civil side, and specifically that it may be filed as an appeal from order under Section 104 of the Code of Civil Procedure read with Order 43 Rule 1. Practice in other States has not always followed that model: at least one Chhattisgarh matter proceeded as a criminal appeal against a conviction, and the Madhya Pradesh High Court has directed that Section 71 appeals be registered as a miscellaneous second appeal and listed before the bench handling that category. An operator and its counsel should check the registry practice of the specific High Court before filing, rather than assuming the Bombay position travels automatically to every jurisdiction.

A more basic problem than forum selection is availability. Very few State Food Safety Appellate Tribunals have actually been constituted and made functional, in sharp contrast to the recent nationwide rollout of the GST Appellate Tribunal's benches. Litigants in a State without a functioning Tribunal have had to approach the High Court directly by writ petition instead of exhausting a statutory remedy that does not, in practice, exist for them, a gap the Act itself does not address and that depends entirely on individual State Governments actually setting up and staffing their Tribunals.

A compliance and response checklist

On receiving an improvement notice, the first and most consequential step is to respond in writing within the window given, addressing each identified defect individually with supporting evidence, rather than offering a general assurance of compliance; the Hotel Alankar and Nirbhavne disputes both turned on exactly this kind of documentary detail at re-inspection, and an operator who cannot produce a clear paper trail of what was fixed and when loses the strongest argument available against an extended suspension. Where a suspension order follows, the operator should press for the mandated re-inspection rather than waiting passively for the authority to schedule it, since delay in re-inspection becomes delay in reopening.

Every inspection score sheet, every communication with the Designated Officer, and every subsequent re-inspection report should be preserved from the outset, because a writ court reviewing a Commissioner's order under Article 226 will look first at exactly this record to decide whether continued suspension remains justified. An operator should also resist, in correspondence and in any appeal, an attempt to use a licensing suspension to address what is really a penalty-track contravention; Hotel Alankar is now a useful authority for the proposition that conduct properly falling under Sections 55 or 63 should be dealt with as a penalty, not folded into continued suspension of the licence itself.

Where the dispute concerns a label claim rather than a hygiene finding, the first question to ask is whether FSSAI issued a show cause notice and gave an opportunity of hearing before acting; if it did not, Dabur, Britannia and Red Bull all show that an interim stay is realistically available, though it buys time rather than a final answer. The right use of that time is to assemble the substantive defence, whether on the accuracy of the underlying claim, the specific Schedule under which it might be permitted, or a territorial jurisdiction argument of the kind ITC has raised, rather than treating the interim order as the end of the matter. Finally, on the recall side, an operator should not wait for a formal FSSAI direction once its own internal testing or complaint data gives it reason to believe a product is non-compliant; the Act's own language places that obligation on the operator from the moment of its own belief, and a recall plan that is reviewed only after a problem has already surfaced is, by definition, too late.

What remains unsettled

Several questions central to this area remain genuinely open rather than merely untested. Whether an improvement notice is a mandatory legal precondition to immediate suspension, or only the ordinary practice from which the public health exception allows departure, was expressly left unresolved in Nirbhavne and has not since been settled by a higher court. The substantive question in each of the Dabur, Britannia and ITC disputes, whether the specific claims under challenge in fact violate Regulation 10 of the Advertising and Claims Regulations, has not been decided by any court; every order so far is interim and rests largely, though in Britannia's case not entirely, on the absence of a prior hearing rather than on the merits of the claim itself.

The forum for a Section 71(6) appeal from the Tribunal to the High Court, civil or otherwise, is not applied uniformly across States, and an operator cannot safely assume the Bombay position will be followed elsewhere. The territorial jurisdiction question raised in the ITC dispute, over whether a central licence and the location of FSSAI's Chief Executive Officer in Delhi can found jurisdiction against an improvement notice issued by a State authority elsewhere, was still pending decision at last report. And the Supreme Court's judgment on mandatory front-of-pack warning labels, reserved after questioning FSSAI's proposed year-long voluntary compliance period, had not been delivered as this article was prepared, leaving both the final design of any warning symbol and its implementation timeline undecided.

The pattern across 2026's FSSAI litigation is consistent even where the outcomes differ: courts have been far more willing to intervene on how a decision was reached than on what the decision should finally be. A suspension survives scrutiny where the record shows a fair process and a continuing risk; it falls where the record shows rectification ignored or a hearing never given. A label claim's fate on the merits is, in every dispute considered here, still to be decided, while the procedural question of whether FSSAI gave the business a chance to respond has, so far, decided every interim order.

For a food business operator, the practical consequence is that process discipline on both sides of the relationship now carries more weight than it once did. An operator that documents its compliance carefully gives itself the strongest available defence against an open-ended suspension. A regulator that moves straight to an emergency direction without a hearing gives the operator its clearest route to interim relief, even where the underlying concern about the label or the product may later prove justified. Until the Supreme Court decides the front-of-pack warning case and the High Courts resolve the claims disputes now pending, that is the operating reality any business in this sector has to plan around.

Frequently Asked Questions

References & Further Reading

The provisions, rulings and official documents below were relied on for this article, which states the law as on 21 October 2026. The position can change with amendments, rules and later decisions, so check the current text before acting on any of it.

1. Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, Section 28 (duty to recall non-compliant food)
2. Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, Section 31 (licensing and registration)
3. Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, Section 32 (improvement notice, suspension and cancellation of licence)
4. Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, Section 32(4)(c) (appeal to Commissioner of Food Safety)
5. Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, Section 49 (guidelines for imposing penalty)
6. Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, Section 52 (penalty for misbranded food)
7. Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, Sections 55 and 63 (general contravention and carrying on business without licence)
8. Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, Section 68 (adjudication) and Section 68(3) (proceedings deemed judicial)
9. Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, Section 70 (appeal to Food Safety Appellate Tribunal; limitation of 30 plus 30 days)
10. Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, Section 71(6) (appeal to High Court from Tribunal; limitation of 60 plus 60 days)
11. Food Safety and Standards (Licensing and Registration of Food Businesses) Regulations, 2011, Regulation 2.1.8 (suspension and cancellation procedure)
12. Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018, Regulation 9 (conditional claims) and Regulation 10 (prohibited claims)
13. Food Safety and Standards (Food Recall Procedure) Regulations, 2017, Regulation 7 (recall plan)
14. 2026 amendment to the Food Safety and Standards licensing framework introducing perpetual validity of licences and registrations, effective 1 April 2026
15. 3S And Our Health Society v. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition (Civil) No. 437 of 2024, Supreme Court of India (order dated 9 April 2025; proceedings continuing through 2026, judgment reserved)
16. Hotel Alankar v. State of Maharashtra, 2026 BHC-KOL 8650-DB, Bombay High Court (Kolhapur Bench)
17. Sanjay Baburao Nirbhavne v. State of Maharashtra, Writ Petition No. 8429 of 2026, Bombay High Court
18. Dabur India Ltd. v. Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, interim order dated 7-8 August 2026, Delhi High Court
19. Britannia Industries Ltd. v. Food Safety and Standards Authority of India & Ors., interim order dated 16 October 2026, Delhi High Court
20. ITC Ltd. v. Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, interim order dated on or about 24-26 August 2026, Delhi High Court
21. Red Bull India Pvt. Ltd. v. Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, order dated 29 September 2026, Delhi High Court
22. Allahabad High Court ruling reported at 2015 (6) ALJ 426, on the civil character of Adjudicating Officer and Tribunal proceedings under Chapter X
23. Tata Chemicals Ltd. v. State of Maharashtra, 2024 BHC-NAG 5692, Bombay High Court (Nagpur Bench)

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