8 Labelling Rules Packaged Food Brands Get Wrong

Your pack can taste brilliant and still fail. I see it often. A brand spends months on the recipe, prints ten thousand pouches, and then a retailer, a marketplace or an inspecting officer stops the lot over words and symbols that cost nothing to fix at the artwork stage. The Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations, 2020 set the label rules for pre-packaged food in India. Eight of them trip up packaged brands again and again.

The short answer: get the veg or non-veg mark, the FSSAI logo with the right licence numbers, net quantity, the nutrition panel, the allergen line, the dates, the maker and importer details, and the print size right — all eight, on every variant and every pack size. Miss one and the pack is non-compliant, however good the rest looks. Here is each rule, and the error I keep meeting.

1. Using the old non-veg mark, or hiding the veg mark

Vegetarian food carries a green filled circle inside a green-outlined square. Non-vegetarian food carries a brown filled triangle inside a brown-outlined square. That triangle matters. The 2020 Regulations replaced the old brown circle with it, yet old artwork still circulates in print folders. The mark sits on the front panel, on a background that contrasts with it, close to the name of the food or the brand name. Its size scales with the panel area. A tiny mark tucked into a corner fails. So does calling an egg product vegetarian. Egg counts as non-vegetarian here. Check every flavour. Check every size.

2. Printing the FSSAI logo without the right licence numbers

The FSSAI logo and licence number go on the label in a colour that stands out against the background. One number is often not enough. The brand owner's logo and 14-digit licence number must appear. If your manufacturer, packer or bottler is a different business, that licence number must appear too. Brands that outsource packing miss this second number most. Importers have their own duty: the importer's FSSAI logo and licence number sit with the importer's name and address. Before you print, line up every licence behind the pack and confirm each number on the label matches a live licence.

3. Treating net quantity as a design choice

Net quantity belongs on the display panel, in metric units — grams, kilograms, millilitres or litres — for the food as packed, without the wrapper's weight dressed up as product. Regulation 5(8) ties this declaration to the Legal Metrology (Packaged Commodities) Rules, which also govern the retail sale price and consumer care details that sit beside it. The errors are dull and common. Quantity printed only in ounces. drained weight confused with total weight. A family pack relabelled with a sticker that covers the original declaration. Print it once. Print it plainly. Leave it visible.

4. Keeping the old one-column nutrition panel

Your panel must declare energy, protein, carbohydrate, total sugars, added sugars, total fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol and sodium. Three views of those numbers are required: per 100 grams or 100 millilitres, per serve, and the percentage of the recommended dietary allowance in each serve. State the serve size. State how many serves the pack holds. Think of that % RDA column as a fuel gauge for the buyer — it shows how much of the day's tank one serve uses. Old packs still show per 100 grams alone. That format is out of date. Rebuild the panel from your lab report, not from last year's artwork.

5. Skipping the allergen declaration

Eight groups must be declared when they are present: cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, milk, eggs, fish, peanuts and tree nuts, soybeans, and sulphite at 10 milligrams per kilogram or more. The wording is a plain "Contains …" statement after the ingredients. Shared lines and shared fryers create a second duty. Where cross-contact is possible but not certain, say "May contain …" and name the allergen. Silence helps nobody. A biscuit brand that lists wheat flour in the ingredients and still skips the allergen line has done half the job. Do the full half. Your allergic customer reads nothing else first.

6. Mixing up "best before" and "expiry"

Two dates are compulsory, and they sit together in one place: the date of manufacture or packaging, and the expiry or use-by date. Miss either one and the pack fails. "Best before" is different. It speaks about quality — taste, texture, freshness — and the Regulations treat it as extra information you may add. It never replaces the expiry or use-by date, the safety line after which the food must not be sold. I still see long-life products carrying "best before" alone, as if it were the stronger promise. It is not. Add "best before" only beside the two compulsory dates.

7. Leaving the maker, packer or importer half-identified

The label must carry the name and complete address of the brand owner, introduced by honest words — "Manufactured by", "Marketed by" or "Packed by", as your facts stand. A post box or a city name alone will not do. White-label brands get caught here: your brand, somebody else's factory, and a label that names only you. Imported food adds two lines. The Indian importer's name and complete address go on the pack, and so does the country of origin. Unsure which address set your model needs? Settle it before printing — our guide to the FSSAI licence for packaged food brands walks through the split.

8. Shrinking the type until nobody can read it

Legibility is a rule, not a taste. The height of letters and numerals on the principal display panel rises with the panel's area — 1 millimetre on the smallest panels, stepping up to 6 millimetres on the largest. A letter's width must stay in proportion, at least a third of its height. Declarations go in English or in Hindi in Devanagari script; another language may sit beside them, never instead of them. Busy backgrounds, gold foil on cream, text wrapped over a photograph — each one quietly breaks the rule. Hold the printed pack at arm's length. If you squint, the officer will too. Fix the artwork.

None of this needs a new factory. It needs one careful hour with the artwork file, the Regulations open beside it, and each licence, lab report and address proof in hand. Print is permanent in a way a web page never is. A website edit takes minutes; a wrong print run follows you to every shelf it reached. Work through the eight checks above for every stock-keeping unit, not just your bestseller, because an officer can pick any pack off any shelf. Keep the signed-off artwork and the licence copies together, so the next reprint starts from a clean file.

If your labels need a proper check before the next print run, start with the licence that sits behind them. Our FSSAI registration and licensing service covers Basic Registration, State and Central Licences, and the paperwork that supports them — and the documents checklist for FSSAI registration and licensing shows what to keep ready. Get the licence right, then print with confidence.