Food safety cannot be a one-sided fight

The food safety risks to Indian consumers are not confined to the digital economy.

India today stands at a unique crossroads: rising urban consumption, booming quick-commerce deliveries, and the stubborn dominance of unorganised offline retail, where food safety risks remain largely invisible. As consumers demand speed and choice, the real question is: at what cost to safety?

In a country where groceries arrive within minutes, food safety debates often fixate on delivery speed, ignoring the less visible but more critical issues of storage, handling, and oversight. Any lapse, however minor, poses a direct risk to public health.

FSSAI requires quick-commerce and online platforms to ensure a minimum of 30 percent shelf life or 45 days remaining on packaged food products at the time of delivery. This is a necessary provision, but it is also an incomplete one. Enforcement cannot be designed around what is easier to supervise or more visible to the media. The food safety risks to Indian consumers are not confined to the digital economy. They are distributed – and often amplified – within the fragmented, under-regulated world of offline retail, all around us.

Across India, unorganised physical grocery stores – ranging from small kirana outlets to large local supermarkets – routinely operate with questionable or outright fraudulent practices. Expired goods are not discarded but repackaged. Near-expiry inventory is often bought in bulk from manufacturers or distributors and sold under private labels with extended shelf-life claims. These are systemic supply chain practices stretching from producer to retailer. Consumers have little means to detect such repackaging and even fewer avenues for redress.

Digital platforms, by contrast, offer traceability – transactions are logged, inventory is centralised, and sellers are identifiable via GSTINs. Yet that visibility doesn’t always translate into timely action. A single warehouse raid can reveal multiple violations, making enforcement scalable. In July this year, FSSAI issued a strong warning to online food platforms, requiring them to disclose all warehouse/storage details, display FSSAI licence numbers prominently on invoices and product listings, and ensure vendor compliance across supply chains. This builds on previous shelf-life norms, making digital oversight deeper and broader.

Unsurprisingly, digital commerce receives the bulk of scrutiny, while the more opaque world of physical retail continues to operate with little oversight and even less accountability. Local food stalls, unauthorised eateries, and unlicensed food carts are widespread across Indian cities and towns, yet they remain untouched due to political and electoral sensitivities.

Another invisible risk lies in the uneven enforcement capacity across states. Food safety departments are unevenly staffed, trained, and funded, which means that even the best rules fail if inspections remain sporadic or perfunctory. A systemic problem cannot be solved with selectively strong central directives; it needs predictable, well-resourced local enforcement.

Beyond public health, there is a direct economic cost. Each food safety scare erodes consumer trust, dents brand reputations, and discourages small producers who invest in compliance but find themselves competing with those who do not. Over time, this damages India’s credibility as a source of safe, quality food products, both at home and in export markets.

This imbalance carries consequences. The vast majority of food and grocery sales in India still occur offline. As of 2024, online platforms accounted for just 5–6 percent of total retail. Targeting this sliver of the market addresses neither scale nor risk. To focus primarily on e-commerce is to confuse convenience with priority.

Moreover, the asymmetry in enforcement distorts the marketplace. Digital platforms, by virtue of their traceability, are subject to reputational damage with every minor violation. Traditional retail, by contrast, benefits from regulatory ambiguity and operational anonymity.

The health consequences of this disparity are significant. Consumers purchasing from offline retailers often face greater exposure to expired or improperly stored products. That these actions persist without consequence reflects a structural failure of oversight. It also reveals a troubling truth: the safety of the consumer is still conditional – dependent not on regulation, but on where they shop.

Rectifying this imbalance requires three shifts.

First, regulatory deterrence must be strengthened. Penalties for non-compliance should increase with each subsequent violation across the supply chain. At present, it is cheaper to violate and negotiate than to comply with food safety norms. This cost-benefit calculation must be reversed.

Second, enforcement must be extended – not just intensified. FSSAI and state food safety departments must increase the frequency and scope of inspections across physical retail. This includes kirana stores, local supermarkets, and even public godowns. Raids on e-commerce warehouses may yield headline results, but they do not solve for the largest share of food transactions in the country. Recent developments from Rajasthan show what consistent offline enforcement can achieve – hundreds of convictions for food adulteration within just months, with an overwhelming majority of court rulings favouring regulatory action. When inspection is persistent, accountability follows. Regulation earns its authority not by targeting the visible, but by confronting the systemic.

Third, consumer participation must be built into the enforcement framework. The public cannot be expected to file complaints when they are unaware of the agency responsible or the process for redress. FSSAI should mandate the use of QR codes on all packaged food items – regardless of source, scale, or label – linking directly to its Food Safety Connect app. Consumers must have access to a simple, standardised reporting mechanism that does not discriminate between offline and online purchases.

Technology offers an even broader route to proactive oversight: a national public dashboard of violations, AI-based tracking of repeat offenders across supply chains, and real-time alerts for regulators. Just as digital payments leapfrogged cash constraints, digital public goods can help food safety leapfrog capacity gaps, if regulators choose to invest.

The larger objective must remain clear. Food safety is a public health mandate. It is central to consumer trust and national well-being. And it requires systems that are uniform in their expectations and unambiguous in their accountability. Consumers do not consume by channel – they consume by need. The burden of safety should not fall heavier on some simply because others are harder to monitor.

Food safety cannot operate on temperature-style margins of acceptance. One cannot say 98.9 percent safe is good enough. Ultimately, food safety is a right for every consumer. India’s regulatory agencies have the opportunity and the obligation to build a food safety regime that is proportionate, fair, and capable of addressing the risks where they actually exist.