Emami Agrotech Limited sells sunflower oil and kachchi ghani mustard oil under the brand name Healthy & Tasty. On 5 June 2026, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India issued the company a show cause notice over that name, taking the position that calling an edible oil healthy could mislead a buyer and that the claim was ambiguous and unverifiable in a way the Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018 do not permit. The regulations bar health and nutrition claims on food labels unless a business can back them with evidence that meets the standard the rules set, and FSSAI treated the brand name itself as falling within that bar rather than as a mere trademark.
A show cause notice of this kind ordinarily gives the recipient a chance to explain why its labelling should stand before the regulator decides anything further. Emami used that opportunity and replied on 23 June 2026, setting out its defence of the brand name and presumably why it did not consider the phrase to be a health or nutrition claim within the meaning the regulations use. FSSAI did not dispose of that reply one way or the other.
Instead, on 17 July 2026, FSSAI wrote directly to food safety commissioners across the states, listing Emami among a set of businesses against which it wanted enforcement action taken over their labelling claims. That letter went out while Emami's reply to the original notice remained pending and undecided, effectively treating the show cause stage as already closed without telling the company so. It was this letter, arriving without any ruling on Emami's explanation, that sent the company to the Delhi High Court.
Justice Amit Mahajan took a dim view of the sequence on a prima facie reading. The judge observed that the show cause notice gave no reason why the term Healthy and Tasty was considered misleading, beyond asserting that it was. A regulator asking a business to show cause is expected to say, at least in outline, what exactly is objectionable about the conduct in question. A notice that simply restates the regulation it relies on, without applying it to the facts at hand, gives the recipient little to actually answer.
The court was equally unimpressed that FSSAI moved to enforcement, through the July letter to state commissioners, before Emami's reply had been considered at all. Due process in an administrative proceeding is not satisfied by inviting a response and then acting as though none had been received. Whatever the merits of FSSAI's underlying concern about the brand name, the sequence here skipped a step the regulations assume will happen before coercive steps follow.
On this reasoning, the court restrained FSSAI from taking any further steps pursuant to the 5 June show cause notice or the 17 July letter, as against Emami, until the next date of hearing. The matter has been listed for February 2027, giving FSSAI time to either withdraw the notice, decide the pending reply, or defend its position with the reasoning the court found missing the first time around.
The order is interim and procedural. It does not hold that Healthy & Tasty is a lawful or an accurate description of the products carrying it, and it leaves FSSAI free to proceed against Emami afresh, provided it actually engages with the company's reply and explains, rather than asserts, why the claim is misleading. Nothing in the ruling forecloses that outcome.
Emami is one of several food businesses FSSAI flagged in 2026 over labelling and claims it considered misleading, a list that has also included disputes over Dabur's 100% claims and Britannia's no added sugar labelling, both of which likewise ended up before the Delhi High Court on broadly similar procedural grounds. In each instance the pattern has been the same: FSSAI issues a notice or an order aimed at a labelling claim, the business approaches the High Court, and the court's intervention turns not on whether the claim is in fact misleading but on whether the company was heard, and heard properly, before the regulator acted. For food business operators facing a labelling notice, the lesson is that a regulator convinced a brand name misleads consumers still has to do the administrative work of explaining that conclusion to the party it affects, and of actually deciding a pending reply, before moving to direct state authorities to enforce against it.