FSSAI tells the Supreme Court it will put red hexagons on high-fat, high-sugar packs

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India filed a six-page compliance affidavit in the Supreme Court on Friday proposing pictorial front-of-pack warning labels on packaged foods high in fat, sugar and salt. The filing answers a public interest petition by the Kerala-based group 3S and Our Health Society, which asked for warnings that a shopper can read without turning the pack over.

Under the proposal, a red hexagon would appear on products that are high in any two or more of three listed nutrients: added saturated fat, added sugar and salt. The cut-offs would follow the Dietary Guidelines for Indians, 2024, issued by the ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition. The label would carry short phrases such as High Fat, High Sugar, High Salt or Highly Sweetened Beverage, depending on the product.

FSSAI said the warning should sit in a font one point larger than the nutrition table on the back of the pack. The point of that rule is visibility. Current law already requires an ingredient list and a nutrition panel. The petitioners say those panels are ignored at the shelf.

How the Court forced the shift

A bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran had already told the Centre that public health could not wait for another committee. After an earlier FSSAI plan that offered only a numerical table of daily limits, the judges asked why India would not use interpretive warnings of the kind already common in Chile, Mexico and parts of Europe. They gave the government two weeks.

That order followed years of delay. In February 2026 the Court had asked FSSAI to consider colour-coded front-of-pack labels and to come back in four weeks. The regulator instead offered numbers. The petitioners then told the Court that FSSAI had withheld minutes of a 30 June 2021 meeting in which its own officials recorded that there were no substantive studies showing a monochrome guideline-daily-amount label worked.

Reuters reported this week that the government dropped an earlier warning-label draft after companies objected in private. After that reporting, consumers and public-health groups posted photographs of Coca-Cola and Nestle packs that already carry warning stamps in other markets. Friday’s affidavit is the first official reversal on paper.

What the hexagon would and would not do

A red shape on the front of a biscuit sleeve does not ban the biscuit. It changes the cost of ignoring the contents. Chile’s black octagons, introduced in 2016, cut purchases of high-sugar drinks and forced recipe changes. Mexico followed. India would be adopting the same idea with a different geometry and with thresholds drawn from its own 2024 dietary guidelines rather than from imported tables.

Industry will now argue about serving size, about whether “added” sugar excludes naturally occurring sugars in fruit pastes, and about how long factories get to reprint wrappers. The affidavit does not settle those points. It also leaves some categories under existing rules rather than under the new stamp. The Court will see those gaps when the matter is next listed.

For parents the useful change is simpler. A child reaching for a drink would see Highly Sweetened Beverage before seeing a cartoon. That is the claim the petitioners have made since 2025. FSSAI has now put a design in front of the judges. The remaining work is a notification with dates, and a check that the hexagon is large enough to survive a supermarket shelf that is already full of claims.