Britannia Industries carries claims such as 'No Added Sugar', 'No Maida' and 'No Palm Oil' on the packaging of some of its biscuits and cookies, including its NutriChoice Millets range. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India took a different view of those claims. It issued a show-cause notice on 2 September 2026 under Regulation 6(1) of the Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018, questioning whether a set of claims on the packaging, including 'No Added Sugar', 'No Maida', 'No Palm Oil' and '100% Millets', were misleading to consumers.
That notice was followed by a communication on 9 October 2026 in which FSSAI directed Britannia to remove the 'No Added Sugar', 'No Maida' and 'No Palm Oil' claims from the labels altogether. A show-cause notice ordinarily gives a company a chance to respond before any final order issues, so a direction to remove the claims arriving a little over a month later, while the show-cause process was apparently still live, is part of what Britannia's petition put in issue before the Court. Britannia moved the Delhi High Court against that communication, arguing that each of these statements is a plain, factual description of what the product does not contain, not a claim the 2018 Regulations prohibit, and that the regulator's direction proceeded on an incorrect reading of the rules without a reasoned basis for treating accurate ingredient-absence statements as misleading.
Justice Amit Mahajan was not persuaded, at least at this interim stage, that FSSAI's position could stand unexamined. The order of 16 October 2026 records the Court's prima facie view that stating these facts about a product cannot be alleged to undermine the products of other manufacturers or to improperly influence consumer behaviour in a manner that violates the food safety regulations. On that basis, the Court stayed the operative part of FSSAI's 9 October communication so far as it concerned the three ingredient-absence claims, allowing Britannia to keep them on its packaging while the writ petition is heard out. The order is explicitly tentative, confined to what the Court could see at first glance from the petition and the communication under challenge, and it leaves FSSAI free to argue the full merits of its position once the petition comes up for final hearing.
The '100% Millets' claim stood on different footing. It was not covered by the stay, and Britannia told the Court it would stop using it on the challenged packaging. The company was careful to make clear that this was not a concession that the claim was false. Reports of the order note Britannia's position that its product does, in fact, contain 100% millets, and that dropping the claim for now was without prejudice to maintaining that position later in the litigation.
FSSAI's underlying worry, as the show-cause notice frames it, is less about any single word on a packet and more about a pattern of 'free-from' claims across the packaged food industry that imply an absence of risk, or an implicit comparison with competitors who do use sugar, refined flour or palm oil, without any corresponding nutritional disclosure requirement forcing companies to justify the comparison. That concern has shown up in other recent FSSAI actions against ingredient-absence claims on energy drinks and on other packaged food labels, several of which have also run into interim court relief this year, suggesting the regulator is testing a broader enforcement push across the packaged food sector rather than targeting Britannia in isolation. If that is the strategy, companies across the industry carrying similar claims have reason to watch how the Britannia petition is finally decided, since the reasoning in that order is likely to shape how FSSAI frames its next round of notices.
For now, the dispute sits exactly where interim orders tend to leave things: Britannia keeps its labels as they stood before the October communication, minus the millets claim, and FSSAI's underlying objection to the regulatory basis for ingredient-absence claims remains to be argued on merits. Food businesses carrying similar 'no added sugar' or 'no maida' claims should not read this order as a final word that such claims are permissible, only as confirmation that FSSAI will have to justify, with reasons, why a factually accurate claim about what a product lacks counts as misleading before it can force a label change.