India has no dedicated mechanism to police misleadingly labelled packaged food sold online, and the two regulators involved disagree on who owns the problem, the Standing Committee on Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution found in a report tabled in both Houses on July 23, 2026.
The committee’s two core recommendations to close the gap:
- A joint task framework: The Department of Consumer Affairs (DoCA) should work with the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), State Food Safety Authorities and the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) to “explore the establishment of a coordinated monitoring mechanism or joint task framework” for mislabelling and misleading claims on e-commerce platforms.
- Platform-level takedowns: Mechanisms for “timely detection, real-time monitoring and prompt removal of misleading product listings be strengthened in collaboration with e-commerce platforms.”
The jurisdiction problem: DoCA told the committee that online food mislabelling falls entirely outside its remit. The “regulation of mislabelled packaged food products sold online falls exclusively under the jurisdiction of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI),” it said, adding that such products sit outside the Legal Metrology Act, 2009 and the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, as per the Allocation of Business Rules.
DoCA has “not established a dedicated task force exclusively for enforcement actions against mislabelled packaged food products sold online,” it confirmed. Its Legal Metrology Officers inspect e-commerce listings only for quantitative declarations:
- Name and address of the manufacturer, packer or importer
- Country of origin
- Generic name of the commodity
- Net quantity
- Best-before or use-by date
- Retail sale price
Nutritional labelling and sugar-related claims fall to FSSAI through State Food Safety Authorities. Asked whether any system exists to monitor and pull misleading listings in real time, DoCA described none.
The committee called this inadequate for a growing online food market. The “absence of a dedicated institutional mechanism for monitoring mislabelling of food products sold online could lead to gaps in enforcement and delay in addressing misleading or non-compliant product listings,” it said.
Why it matters: The takedown recommendation responds to a live failure. In June 2026, MediaNama found that products FSSAI had flagged for misleading claims stayed on sale across Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart. FSSAI had issued notices to 14 direct-to-consumer food brands on June 14, 2026, including Storia over a pomegranate juice the regulator said implied pure juice while containing 4% concentrate. The notices went to the brands, but the listings stayed up. A joint framework with real-time takedown obligations on platforms is aimed squarely at that disconnect.
FSSAI has spent two years pressing platforms on labelling without…
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