FSSAI's front-of-pack labels: where they stand
India has no mandatory front-of-pack nutrition warning as of this writing. A star-rating scheme called the Indian Nutrition Rating has been in draft since September 2022, the Supreme Court pushed the regulator on it in February 2026, and FSSAI asked for more time in March. Until something is notified, the back of the pack remains the only place the numbers live.
This page explains what is proposed, why it has taken so long, and how a 0–100 score relates to the systems used elsewhere.
What is proposed
The draft amendment to the labelling regulations proposes the Indian Nutrition Rating (INR): a rating from 0.5 to 5 stars printed on the front, calculated from energy, sugar, salt and saturated fat as negatives, offset by protein and fibre as positives. More stars means a better nutritional profile.
The draft drew more than 14,000 public comments and went to an expert committee. A competing approach — red hexagonal HIGH IN SUGAR / HIGH IN SALT / HIGH IN FAT warnings, of the kind used in Chile and several Latin American countries — has been raised repeatedly, including in court, on the argument that a warning is harder to ignore than a rating.
Why it has taken four years
The public record shows a genuine design disagreement rather than simple delay. A star rating lets a manufacturer improve a score by adding a positive — fortifying with protein or fibre — while leaving the sugar unchanged. A warning label cannot be gamed that way, but it is blunt, and it labels the food rather than describing it.
There is also a scale problem specific to India. A large share of packaged food sold here sits in a narrow nutritional range, so a scheme calibrated abroad can compress most products into one or two ratings and stop distinguishing anything. That is not hypothetical: it is the same failure we measured when we tested European cut-offs against Indian packs.
How the systems compare
Four schemes, four shapes, and it is worth being precise about what each one actually says.
- Indian Nutrition Rating (draft): 0.5 to 5 stars. A summary rating, more is better, one symbol.
- Nutri-Score (Europe): A to E with colours. A summary grade computed from a point system, calibrated on European diets.
- Health Star Rating (Australia and New Zealand): 0.5 to 5 stars, the model the Indian draft most resembles.
- Warning labels (Chile, Mexico, Peru, Israel): one or more black symbols naming the specific problem — high in sugar, high in sodium. Not a summary; a flag per nutrient.
The important split is between summary schemes and warningschemes. A summary answers "how good is this overall". A warning answers "what specifically is wrong with this". They are different questions and a shopper often wants the second.
How a LabelSaaf score relates
A LabelSaaf score is a summary scheme in shape — 0 to 100, in five bands — with the warning-scheme information kept alongside rather than replaced by it. The verdict names the nutrient that moved the score and prints its figure, so the pack gets both a rating and the specific reason.
The point ladders come from Nutri-Score 2023, which is the best-studied of the systems above. The band cut-offs do not: applied unchanged to Indian packs, European cut-offs ran a mean signed error of −18.4 against packs we scored by hand, put 33.8% of a large Indian sample into the bottom band, and made the top band unreachable for all 553 beverages in it. The cut-offs were re-fitted on Indian shelves for exactly the reason the INR drafting has been difficult. The full method.
None of this is a substitute for a regulated label. A voluntary score read by people who choose to look is a different thing from a mandatory symbol every shopper sees. It is what can exist while the regulation does not.
What to do until then
The back of the pack already carries everything a front-of-pack scheme would summarise. Four numbers per 100 g get you most of the way: sugar, sodium, saturated fat, fibre. How to read an Indian food label walks through them.
Common questions
Is the Indian Nutrition Rating in force?
No. It remains a draft. Some manufacturers have adopted symbols voluntarily, which means what you see on one pack is not comparable with another.
Will warnings replace the stars?
Unresolved. The Supreme Court has pressed for a decision and FSSAI has indicated it is considering warning-style labels for foods high in sugar, salt and fat, but nothing is notified.
Does India require the nutrition table itself?
Yes, and that part is settled. Energy, protein, carbohydrate with total and added sugars, total fat with saturated and trans fat, and sodium, per 100 g or 100 ml. Saturated and trans fat are required only above a fat threshold, so a genuinely low-fat pack may omit them compliantly.
Photograph the nutrition table on a pack and get a score out of 100, with the reason behind every point.
Scan a label