Sweet shops across India have coated kaju katli in a thin layer of edible silver or aluminium foil for decades without a second thought from most customers. When a food inspector in Gujarat decided that foil coating amounted to adulteration, the dispute over one batch of kaju katli ended up running for close to two decades before the Gujarat High Court closed it for good.
The prosecution began with a food inspector's sample of kaju katli coated in aluminium foil, seized from the accused's shop and sent for analysis under the adulteration law then in force. A trial followed, and at some stage of these proceedings the conviction that had been recorded against the accused was reversed on appeal, well before the matter reached the High Court. The State, dissatisfied with that reversal, filed a criminal appeal under Section 378 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, arguing that the acquittal was contrary to law and to the evidence on record.
Justice Hemant M. Prachchhak, hearing the State's appeal as a single judge, confirmed the acquittal and gave two independent reasons for doing so. The first went to the heart of what adulteration actually requires. Per LiveLaw's report of the judgment, the court found no evidence on record that aluminium foil used as a coating was injurious to health or rendered the sweet unfit for human consumption. Using a coating that nobody could show was harmful did not, by itself, make the kaju katli adulterated.
The second ground was procedural, and it concerned how the sample itself had been collected. Per Verdictum's account, the food inspector's own testimony admitted that he had not cleaned the sample bottle before taking the sample. The State argued before the High Court that this admission was corroborated, and in effect neutralised, by the panchnama recorded at the time of seizure. The court was not persuaded. A sampling process compromised at that basic a level undercut the prosecution's case independently of whatever the foil itself was found to contain.
Either ground on its own would likely have been enough to sustain the acquittal, and the judgment rests on both together. The reporting available does not make clear which ground carried more weight with the court, since LiveLaw's account foregrounds the absence of proof of harm from the foil while Verdictum's account foregrounds the flawed sampling procedure; both facts appear in the judgment, but their relative importance is not something the secondary reporting resolves.
The ruling matters well beyond kaju katli and well beyond Gujarat. Food safety prosecutions brought under the older Prevention of Food Adulteration framework, and increasingly under the Food Safety and Standards Act that replaced it, tend to fail or succeed on exactly these two questions: did the prosecution actually prove the substance in question was harmful or rendered the food unfit, and did the sampling procedure that produced the evidence follow the basic protocol the law demands. A prosecution that cannot answer both questions cleanly risks an acquittal that, as this case shows, can take the State nearly two decades of appeals to accept.
For FSSAI enforcement officers and the food businesses they inspect, the practical lesson cuts in a specific direction. An ingredient or coating long accepted in trade practice, as edible foil plainly is on Indian sweets, cannot be treated as adulterant merely because a particular inspector takes a different view of it. The regulator has to put actual evidence of harm on record, not an assumption that any coating not expressly permitted must therefore be unsafe. And whatever that evidence turns out to be, it will not survive scrutiny if the sample that generated it was collected in a bottle the inspector admits, under oath, he never bothered to clean first. Nearly two decades passed between seizure and the final word from the High Court, a timeline that should itself give prosecutors pause before pressing an adulteration case built on assumption rather than proof.