The Supreme Court has put the Centre on notice over introducing nutritional education in schools to help children understand food labels and make informed dietary choices, while seeking a detailed response from the food regulator on almost every aspect of its proposed front-of-pack warning labels (FoPL), including their size, font, placement, colour and timeline for implementation.
The court also questioned the basis for distinguishing between products high in two or more nutrients and those high in a single nutrient, noting that excess sugar, salt and saturated fat are independently associated with different health risks. The court raised equally pointed questions about the physical design of the proposed warning. The court cited the UNICEF Child Nutrition Report 2025, noting that the proportion of overweight school-age children and adolescents aged five to 19 increased from 2% to 10% between 2000 and 2022. It also noted that while around 80% of food and beverages available inside schools are freshly cooked meals, nearly 80% of those available in the vicinity of schools are packaged snacks.
In a detailed order passed on Thursday night, a bench of justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran said children were particularly vulnerable to “impulse or uninformed dietary decision-making” and asked the Union government to explain how schools could incorporate nutritional literacy through curriculum, initiatives and workshops, including teaching children how to interpret nutritional information and FoPL on packaged foods. At the same time, the court questioned the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) over its proposal to introduce the warnings in two phases — initially for packaged foods high in two or more nutrients of concern and later for products high in any one of them, saying the absence of a fixed timeline could result in the second phase being “indefinitely postponed”. The court’s intervention came a day after the Centre told it that it was open to making red warning labels mandatory on packaged food products high in even one nutrient of concern — sugar, salt or fat, dropping the FSSAI ’s earlier proposal to trigger warnings only when a product exceeded limits for two or more such nutrients. It pointed to an apparent disparity between the 2024 Dietary Guidelines for Indians and the FSSAI’s earlier draft regulations in their use of “and” and “or” while defining high-fat, sugar and salt (HFSS) foods. FSSAI has suggested a red hexagon, one point larger in font than the nutritional information table on the back of the pack, carrying warnings such as “HIGH FAT”, “HIGH SUGAR” and “HIGH SALT”.
