On August 28, FSSAI filed a compliance affidavit in the Supreme Court proposing a red hexagonal warning label for packaged foods high in fat, sugar or salt, marked "HIGH FAT," "HIGH SUGAR," "HIGH SALT" or "HIGHLY SWEETENED BEVERAGE." Read as a headline, it is India finally doing what Chile, Mexico and more than a dozen other countries have already done: putting a plain warning on the front of the pack instead of burying nutrition facts on the back. The case that forced FSSAI's hand, 3S and Our Health Society v. Union of India, has been pushing the regulator toward exactly this for months.
It is worth slowing down on the design, not just the symbol. Under FSSAI's Phase I proposal, a product only qualifies for the warning if it is high in two or more of added saturated fat, added sugar and salt, not any single one, and single-ingredient products such as ghee, edible oil, salt, sugar, jaggery and honey are exempt outright regardless of how concentrated they are. A pack of biscuits loaded with sugar alone, or salty enough on its own to matter, would not carry a red hexagon under this design. It would need to fail on two fronts at once.
What is at stake is not abstract. India's National NCD Monitoring Survey, conducted in 2017-18 and published in Frontiers in Public Health, found a national prevalence of diagnosed diabetes of 9.3 percent among adults aged 18 to 69, with a further 24.5 percent showing impaired fasting glucose, the pre-diabetic stage that diet is most able to influence. That is the population a front-of-pack warning is trying to reach before the next meal, not after the diagnosis.
FSSAI is the outlier among the regimes with a comparable single-nutrient standard.
Chile's warning octagon fires the moment a product crosses on any one nutrient, as does Mexico's NOM-051 seal and the WHO's own regional nutrient model applied to India. India's draft is the only one in this comparison that requires two.
Thirteen questions from the bench
On September 10, a Supreme Court bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran put 13 clarificatory questions to FSSAI about the thresholds themselves, giving the regulator 10 days to respond and setting the next hearing for September 28. The same hearing record lays out the actual numbers: under the 2024 Dietary Guidelines for Indians from ICMR-NIN, a solid food is "high" once it crosses roughly 3 grams of added sugar, 4.2 grams of added fat, 625 milligrams of salt or 250 kilocalories per 100 grams, with lower cutoffs for liquids.
Two nutrients must independently cross these lines before a warning applies.
| Nutrient | Solid foods, per 100g | Liquids, per 100mL |
|---|---|---|
| Added sugar | 3 g | 2 g |
| Added fat | 4.2 g | 1.5 g |
| Salt | 625 mg | 175 mg |
| Energy | 250 kcal | 70 kcal |
Source: Supreme Court hearing record, citing the 2024 Dietary Guidelines for Indians (ICMR-NIN), via LiveLaw.
Bar and Bench reports that the same bench questioned whether the red hexagon's colour could be confused with the mandatory red symbol already used for non-vegetarian food, found no fixed timeline separating the current two-nutrient Phase I from a future Phase II that would flag on any single nutrient, and warned that Phase II risks indefinite postponement without one. The bench also noted that FSSAI had shown no scientific basis for treating sugar, salt and saturated fat as harmful only in combination, when each is independently harmful on its own. That is the bench's language, not an outside critic's: the design choice at the centre of the label is one the regulator has not yet had to defend with evidence.
A stricter number that still catches less
The two-nutrient rule is not the only place India's draft looks narrower than it first appears. On the one number that lines up cleanly across countries, added sugar in solid food, India's proposed cutoff of 3 grams per 100 grams is actually tighter than Chile's warning-label threshold of 10 grams per 100 grams, which triggers Chile's black warning octagon on sugar alone.
A number three times stricter sounds like tougher regulation. It is not, because Chile only needs that one number to fire and India needs a second nutrient to fail alongside it. A product that is loaded with sugar but unremarkable on fat and salt clears India's bar-shaped hurdle even though it would never clear Chile's. Mexico's NOM-051 system works the same single-nutrient way: an "Exceso" seal fires separately for added sugar, saturated fat or sodium, each assessed on its own, never requiring two to co-occur.
How many products that leaves out
A peer-reviewed study in Nutrients, cited via PubMed Central, applied the WHO South-East Asia Region's single-nutrient model to 10,501 Indian packaged foods and drinks sold between 2015 and 2020 and found that 68 percent would have received at least one "high in" warning, well below a smaller, industry-supplied sample of 1,306 products that had put the figure at 96 percent.
Neither study tested India's actual two-nutrient design, so no published figure exists for what FSSAI's own rule would flag. But the logic runs only one way: a product cannot fail on two nutrients without first failing on at least one, so whatever share clears India's higher bar has to sit at or below that 68 percent, never above it (our calculation). Add the outright exemption for single-ingredient products such as ghee, edible oil, salt, sugar, jaggery and honey, several of them exactly the staples a nutrient-only test would catch, and the population of products carrying a red hexagon shrinks again before the rule has processed a single label.
The honest objection
The strongest case for a two-nutrient design is that it targets the worst combinations first: a product mediocre on one count but fine on the rest is a smaller public-health problem than one that is bad on two counts at once, and a narrower opening rule avoids blanketing shelves with warnings before consumers have learned to read them. Phasing in tougher rules once the softer version proves workable is a defensible sequencing choice in regulation generally.
That case would be stronger if FSSAI had made it. The Supreme Court's own reading, that the regulator has shown no scientific basis for the two-or-more threshold, and that Phase II carries no binding date, is what turns a plausible sequencing argument into an open question the regulator has ten days to answer.
The Signal
The red hexagon is a real step: India has gone from no mandatory front-of-pack warning to a proposed one under court pressure, and that alone puts it ahead of where it stood a year ago. But a warning label is only as strong as the rule that switches it on, and FSSAI's switch needs two triggers where Chile's, Mexico's and the WHO's own model need one. Watch what FSSAI files within the ten-day window the bench set on September 10, and what the bench does with it at the next hearing on September 28. If the response supplies the missing evidence and a fixed date for Phase II, the two-nutrient design becomes a defensible first step. Without that, the label was never designed to catch the products it was named after.
Reporting basis: FSSAI's compliance affidavit and its Phase I nutrient thresholds are as reported by LiveLaw from the Supreme Court case record in 3S and Our Health Society v. Union of India. The diabetes and impaired fasting glucose figures are from India's National NCD Monitoring Survey (2017-18), published in Frontiers in Public Health, accessed via PubMed Central. The September 10 hearing, the bench's 13 questions and the ICMR-NIN threshold figures are also per LiveLaw's reporting of that hearing; the bench's observations on label confusion, the missing Phase II timeline and the absence of a stated scientific basis are per Bar and Bench's separate report of the same hearing, and rest on that single account of the exchange. The 68 percent and 96 percent figures for Indian packaged foods are from a peer-reviewed study published in Nutrients, accessed via PubMed Central, which itself contrasts its findings against an industry-supplied dataset. Chile's threshold is from a peer-reviewed study tabulating its official regulation and Mexico's from a separate peer-reviewed study doing the same, both accessed via PubMed Central. The observation that India's two-nutrient design cannot flag more products than a comparable single-nutrient one, and the sugar-threshold comparison between India and Chile, are The Signal's calculations from those figures.
