Size, font, colour, placement, timeline: Supreme Court quizzes FSSAI on warning labels

The Supreme Court has put the Centre on notice over introducing nutritional education in schools to help children understand food labels and make informed dietary choices, while seeking a detailed response from the food regulator on almost every aspect of its proposed front-of-pack warning labels (FoPL), including their size, font, placement, colour and timeline for implementation.

In a detailed order passed on Thursday night, a bench of justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran said children were particularly vulnerable to “impulse or uninformed dietary decision-making” and asked the Union government to explain how schools could incorporate nutritional literacy through curriculum, initiatives and workshops, including teaching children how to interpret nutritional information and FoPL on packaged foods.

At the same time, the court questioned the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) over its proposal to introduce the warnings in two phases -- initially for packaged foods high in two or more nutrients of concern and later for products high in any one of them, saying the absence of a fixed timeline could result in the second phase being “indefinitely postponed”.

The court’s intervention came a day after the Centre told it that it was open to making red warning labels mandatory on packaged food products high in even one nutrient of concern -- sugar, salt or fat, dropping the FSSAI ’s earlier proposal to trigger warnings only when a product exceeded limits for two or more such nutrients.

The bench said the regulator must provide a “reasonable, scientifically justified and clearly defined timeline” if it retained the phased approach, and asked it to consider an alternative model in which products with the highest levels of nutrients of concern are brought under the warning regime first, followed by products with progressively lower thresholds.

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The court also questioned the basis for distinguishing between products high in two or more nutrients and those high in a single nutrient, noting that excess sugar, salt and saturated fat are independently associated with different health risks. It pointed to an apparent disparity between the 2024 Dietary Guidelines for Indians and the FSSAI’s earlier draft regulations in their use of “and” and “or” while defining high-fat, sugar and salt (HFSS) foods.

The order recorded that the 2024 guidelines prescribe thresholds per 100 ml for liquids of 70 kcal, 175 mg salt, 2 gm added sugar and 1.5 gm added fat, and per 100 gm for solids of 250 kcal, 625 mg salt, 3 gm added sugar and 4.2 gm added fat.

But the bench questioned whether simply applying these thresholds would erase the distinction between food categories 2 and 3 under the 2024 guidelines, and asked FSSAI whether the differences in processing and nutrient levels should be reflected in the FoPL. It also suggested that the distinction between moderately processed foods and ultra-processed foods could be factored into the thresholds.

The court raised equally pointed questions about the physical design of the proposed warning.