On September 28, the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether India's packaged food should carry a mandatory warning label when it's high in sugar, salt or saturated fat — a red hexagon on a white background, roughly the look Canada already uses — and reserved its order rather than ruling on the spot. That procedural detail matters less than what the bench said on the way there: it questioned why the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India still wants a 365-day voluntary compliance window before a single company has to print anything, and Justice J.B. Pardiwala told the regulator plainly that whatever order the Court eventually issues will be binding on it.
The case is called 3S and Our Health Society v. Union of India. The subtext is that India started talking about this exact idea in 2019. Six years of drafts, consultations and one abandoned design later, nothing is on a single packet. A Supreme Court bench is now the body applying the pressure that seven years of regulatory process didn't.
Two designs, two very different philosophies
The thing getting argued over isn't a minor technical footnote — it's the difference between a label that tells you a product is fine and one that tells you it's a problem.
- The star rating (FSSAI's earlier proposal, 2022 draft): A health-star system, voluntary for the first 48 months after final notification. A shopper sees more stars as roughly "better," fewer as "worse" — a sliding scale, no hard line.
- The red hexagon (the current proposal): A blunt, binary warning — present or absent — modelled on labels already in use in Canada. No gradient, no spin: either the product crosses the threshold on sugar, salt or saturated fat, or it doesn't.
The Supreme Court's own skepticism of the star system is part of the record: the bench raised concern that a star rating might not adequately communicate the presence of excessive sugar, salt or saturated fat to an ordinary shopper standing in an aisle with ten seconds to decide. A star system invites comparison between products on a shelf. A warning hexagon invites a single decision about the one product already in your hand. Those are different jobs, and FSSAI spent years building the first one before the regulator itself pivoted toward the second — which is part of why, seven years in, neither has actually shipped.
The argument even FSSAI's own proposal can't settle
Even inside the hexagon-warning camp, there's a fight over what should trigger the label at all, and the two readings aren't a rounding error — they disagree on how many products get flagged:
| Trigger standard | What it catches | Reported source |
|---|---|---|
| Two or more nutrients of concern must be high | A narrower set of products — something has to fail on multiple fronts at once | One line of reporting on FSSAI's position |
| A single nutrient of concern is high | A much wider set — one bad number is enough | A separate line of reporting, also attributed to FSSAI |
A product that's high in sugar alone but unremarkable on salt and saturated fat passes the first test and fails the second. That's not a drafting footnote — it's the difference between a label regime that catches a minority of packaged snacks and one that catches most of them, and as of the September hearing, FSSAI itself hadn't settled on which one it's proposing.
Layered on top of that is a second, more fundamental disagreement the bench has been pushing on directly: whether ultra-processed food should even be judged by the same yardstick as moderately processed food. India's own 2024 dietary guidelines already split packaged food into three tiers — minimally processed, moderately processed, excessively processed — and on September 11, the bench asked why a single nutrient threshold should apply uniformly across tiers that the government's own guidelines treat as categorically different. FSSAI has not yet given the Court a clear scientific basis for treating them the same.
Why the delay has a shape, not just a length
"Seven years and counting" undersells what's actually happened, because the timeline isn't a straight line of inaction — it's two different proposals, abandoned and restarted, with the regulator each time asking for more runway right as the pressure built to finish. The 2022 draft proposed the star system with a 48-month voluntary window. That got shelved in favor of the hexagon warning. The hexagon proposal now comes with its own ask: FSSAI told the Court it wants four months just to finalize the rule, on top of the 365-day voluntary compliance period industry would get once that rule exists. Run the arithmetic and a shopper could still be looking at an unlabeled shelf in 2028, nine years after the idea was first floated — which is the specific number the bench's skepticism was aimed at.
That pattern — proposal, pushback on scope, a request for more time, repeat — isn't unique to food labeling, but it's a particularly visible version of it because the thing being delayed is something every reader already buys weekly. A packaged-food company facing a binary warning label has a straightforward commercial incentive to prefer the slower, narrower, multi-nutrient-trigger version of this rule over the faster, broader, single-nutrient one; nothing in the public record alleges lobbying, but the incentive exists on its face, and it's consistent with why the version that keeps nearly making it to print is reliably the one with the longest runway attached.
What happens next isn't really up to FSSAI anymore
That's the actual news in the September 28 hearing: a regulator that has spent seven years choosing its own pace is now being told, by a court, that it doesn't get to anymore. Pardiwala's comment that the Court's order will be binding is the tell — the bench isn't asking FSSAI to hurry up within a process the regulator still controls, it's signaling it may simply specify the standard and the timeline itself if the reserved order lands that way. For packaged-food companies whose formulations may or may not clear the eventual threshold, that's a materially different planning problem than another year of "the rule is coming." For shoppers, it's the first time in seven years that "coming" has had an enforcement mechanism attached to it that isn't the regulator's own.
NEEDS HUMAN REVIEW: The exact trigger threshold (two-nutrient vs. single-nutrient) is reported inconsistently across secondary sources and FSSAI has not publicly resolved it as of this writing; this piece deliberately presents both readings rather than asserting one. The Supreme Court's order was reserved, not issued, as of September 28, 2026 — any claim that a final rule, timeline or design has been adopted should be verified against the Court's actual order once published, which may postdate this article.