FSSAI Is Deleting “100%” and “Natural” From Food Labels. Green Claims Use the Same Words.
FSSAI has spent months stripping words like 100%, natural and healthy off Indian food packaging. The reasoning it is using applies almost word for word to sustainability claims.
Over the past few months, words have been quietly disappearing from Indian food packaging. Healthy. Natural. Fresh. 100%. No added sugar.
Not because brands changed their minds. Because FSSAI started issuing notices.
FSSAI directed all food businesses to remove the claim of 100% fruit juice from labels and advertisements of reconstituted juice. The reasoning was specific: under the Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018, there is no provision for a 100% claim at all. And it is particularly misleading where the major ingredient is water and the fruit has been reconstituted from concentrate.
Then it widened. A prohibition order against a large FMCG group over 100% claims on honey, ghee and coconut oil. Notices to a confectionery major, a gifting platform and a packaged foods company. A hazelnut spread questioned over All Natural. Two snack brands over the word Healthy.
None of those companies were accused of selling something dangerous. The products were fine. The labels were the problem.
The reasoning matters more than the category
Look at what FSSAI is actually objecting to, because it is not really about juice.
100% is an absolute with no defined basis. A hundred per cent of what, measured how? Natural has no regulatory definition, so it means whatever the reader assumes it means. Healthy is a conclusion the buyer should be drawing, not one the pack should be asserting.
The 2020 Labelling and Display Regulations put it plainly: a label must not create an erroneous impression, and must indicate the true nature of the food.
That sentence reads differently with a sustainability claim in mind.
Every unsupported claim opens what we call a Verification Vacuum — the space between what a brand says and what it can prove. FSSAI is not really policing vocabulary. It is closing that gap, one word at a time.
The overlap is almost word for word
We built Sense to flag language on sustainability claims that tends to attract regulatory attention. The terms it flags most often are 100%, natural, eco-friendly, zero, and unqualified comparatives like better and greener.
Two of those are the exact words FSSAI is currently striking off food packs.
That is not coincidence. It is the same logic: that an unqualified absolute is indefensible, that an undefined adjective is a claim rather than a description, and that the burden of proof sits with whoever printed it.
India’s CCPA guidelines on greenwashing, introduced in 2024, use recognisably the same reasoning. So does ASCI. Different regulator, different aisle, same test — can you substantiate the specific thing the buyer will understand you to have said?
Why we think food came first
Food is easier to enforce. The claims sit on physical packaging, the products are tested anyway, and the harm is legible to a consumer.
Environmental claims are harder. Verifying a recycled-content percentage or a carbon-neutral claim means auditing a supply chain, not reading a label. That difficulty has bought green claims some time.
We would argue it has bought time rather than immunity. The machinery being built for food — notices, prohibition orders, named brands in the trade press — is the same machinery, at the same agencies, that will handle green claims as verification gets cheaper.
The practical read
If you carry a 100% recycled claim, ask what the 100% attaches to. The bottle? The label? The carton it shipped in? If the honest answer needs a footnote, the footnote is the claim.
If you use natural, clean or responsible on pack, you are relying on the reader supplying a definition you have not given them. That was the specific issue in the hazelnut spread notice.
And if your sustainability claim would survive being read by someone actively hunting for the gap between the words and the evidence, then it will probably survive the test now being applied to food.
The competitive advantage is no longer making stronger claims. It is making claims that survive verification.
What we do not know
We do not know the timeline. Enforcement on green claims in India has been slower and far less public than on food, and we have no basis for saying when that changes.
We are also not certain the approach transfers cleanly. Food claims are largely verifiable from the product itself; environmental claims usually are not. That may mean enforcement lands differently rather than simply later.
There is a risk in the other direction too. Our own survey found roughly a third of Indian sustainability claims go out with no independent check — but it also found that seventy per cent of companies with genuinely strong credentials say nothing at all, from fear of scrutiny. A crackdown that pushes more brands into silence is not a good outcome either.
Where we have got to
The food industry is getting a live demonstration of what happens when a claim outruns its evidence. The words are the same. The regulations rhyme. The main difference is that green claims have not had their turn yet.
The next decade of marketing will not belong to brands with the loudest sustainability stories. It will belong to the ones that can demonstrate them.
Closing your own Verification Vacuum is slower work than writing a better line. It is also the only version that holds.
If you are looking at your own pack copy and are not sure which lines would survive that reading, that is a conversation we are always up for.
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