Food safety is often treated as a manufacturing problem. A product leaves a factory with an approved formulation, a valid shelf life, compliant packaging and a quality-control record, and the assumption is that the job is largely done.
But what happens after the factory gate?
Recent enforcement actions in Maharashtra suggest that this is where India’s food-safety story becomes considerably more complicated. In one case, authorities uncovered an organised operation in Navi Mumbai allegedly altering expiry dates and nutritional information on branded food products, including products associated with PepsiCo, Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Unilever, before they were exported. Officials seized products including Lay’s, Maggi and soft drinks, while chemicals and printing equipment were reportedly being used to replace original product information.
In another case, Maharashtra’s Food and Drug Administration suspended the food licence of a Blinkit storage facility in Akola after a re-inspection found that shortcomings relating to storage conditions and unsuitable racks, first flagged in an improvement notice weeks earlier, had still not been corrected. Two Mumbai eateries were also acted against after inspections found poor sanitation, unsafe storage practices and other violations.
These incidents are very different in nature. One points to deliberate fraud, the other to operational non-compliance. Yet both expose the same structural question:
Once food leaves a controlled manufacturing environment, how much visibility does the supply chain really have over what happens to it?
The factory is no longer the finish line.
India’s food ecosystem has become far more sophisticated. Manufacturers operate controlled production environments, implement quality-management systems and increasingly use automation and digital technologies to monitor production and inventory.
Yet the product does not travel directly from a factory to a consumer.
Between those two points are warehouses, distributors, transporters, dark stores, retailers, food-service operators and, increasingly, quick-commerce fulfilment centres. At every handover, there is a potential point of failure.
FSSAI’s regulatory framework recognises this reality. Its food-safety requirements extend across manufacturing, processing, packaging, storage, transportation, distribution and sale. FSSAI guidance also stresses that food safety must be controlled throughout the food chain, from production through final consumption.
The challenge, therefore, is not necessarily the absence of rules. It is whether those rules are consistently implemented across a fragmented network of operators.
This issue becomes particularly important as food distribution becomes faster and more decentralised.
Speed is changing the food-safety equation.
Quick commerce has compressed the distance between warehouse and consumer to minutes rather than days. That has transformed consumer expectations, but it has also created new food-safety questions.
A dark store can function simultaneously as a warehouse, picking centre and last-mile fulfilment point. Products may move through the facility rapidly, but speed does not automatically guarantee correct storage, stock rotation, hygiene or handling.
Maharashtra’s recent enforcement action against quick-commerce facilities illustrates this concern. Earlier in August, the state’s FDA, under food safety chief Tukaram Mundhe, suspended licences for 12 warehouses operated by Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart following inspections that uncovered issues including pest infestations, rotten food and poor sanitary conditions. The Akola case that opened this article was part of the same enforcement drive, led by the same office.
The latest action against Blinkit’s Akola facility adds another dimension: corrective action must itself be verifiable. The company had received a formal improvement notice and time to fix the flagged deficiencies; a follow-up inspection found the same problems still in place.
If an improvement notice is issued but deficiencies remain during a subsequent inspection, the question shifts from whether a standard exists to whether there is an effective mechanism for ensuring compliance.
For the supply chain industry, this is a crucial distinction.
Traceability cannot stop at the warehouse.
Traditional supply-chain visibility has focused heavily on where a shipment is.
Food safety requires asking a different set of questions:
- What temperature was the product exposed to?
- How long was it outside controlled conditions?
- Was the product handled correctly?
- Was stock rotated according to its shelf life?
- Was the packaging damaged?
- Was the product repacked or relabelled?
- Who handled it at each stage?
- Can the company reconstruct the product’s journey if a problem emerges?
FSSAI’s framework already treats storage and transportation as regulated food-business activities. Its licensing system specifically recognises refrigerated and cold storage, as well as specialised food transportation.
But regulatory recognition is only one part of the equation. The next step is creating continuous operational visibility.
A batch number should ideally be more than a manufacturing reference. It should become the anchor for a digital chain of custody, linking production, dispatch, warehouse receipt, storage conditions, movement, order allocation and final sale.
That becomes especially important for products with shorter shelf lives or tighter temperature requirements — and for products that pass through more hands, since more handovers mean more opportunities for that record to break down, whether through negligence or, as the Navi Mumbai case showed, deliberate interference.
The shelf-life problem is also a logistics problem.
The Navi Mumbai case highlights an extreme example: if expiry information can allegedly be manipulated after production, the integrity of the product’s shelf life becomes meaningless.
But even without deliberate tampering, shelf life can be compromised by poor logistics.
A product with six months of theoretical shelf life does not necessarily have six months of commercial life once it has spent time in unsuitable storage conditions, been exposed to excessive heat or humidity, or remained in inventory beyond planned rotation windows.
This is where logistics and food safety become inseparable.
Inventory management systems need to move beyond simply tracking stock quantity. They need to account for age, remaining shelf life, storage conditions and risk.
For perishable and temperature-sensitive products, FEFO — first expired, first out — is particularly important. FSSAI’s recent regulatory amendments have rationalised some record-keeping and stock-rotation requirements for non-manufacturing food businesses, while retaining critical food-safety and traceability safeguards.
The principle remains straightforward: the older or more time-sensitive product cannot be treated as interchangeable with newer inventory.
The human factor remains a weak link.
Technology can provide visibility, but it cannot compensate for poor operating discipline.
The Akola inspection is revealing in this respect. Deficiencies identified in the earlier improvement notice, including storage-related shortcomings, remained unresolved at re-inspection, according to the FDA.
In Mumbai, inspectors also found unlabelled paneer and lassi without expiry dates at one establishment, while a significant number of food handlers reportedly lacked mandatory medical fitness certificates.
These are not necessarily problems that require sophisticated technology to solve. They require basic controls to work every day: trained personnel, documented SOPs, sanitation schedules, temperature checks, pest-control programmes, stock rotation, proper labelling and management accountability.
The supply chain’s weakest link is often not its most technologically backward component. It can simply be the point where established processes are not followed.
From compliance to chain-of-custody thinking
The food industry therefore needs to move from a compliance-at-each-node model to a chain-of-custody model.
In the first model, every participant is responsible for meeting the requirements applicable to its own facility.
In the second, the entire ecosystem takes responsibility for preserving the integrity of the product as it moves between facilities.
That requires greater interoperability between manufacturers, logistics providers, warehouses, retailers and digital commerce platforms.
A manufacturer should be able to establish where a batch went. A logistics provider should be able to demonstrate how it was transported. A warehouse should be able to show how it was stored. A retailer should know how long it remained in inventory. And, where necessary, a regulator should be able to reconstruct the chain quickly.
The technology for much of this already exists: barcode and QR-based identification, warehouse-management systems, IoT sensors, temperature monitoring, GPS tracking, digital audit trails and automated alerts.
The bigger challenge is connecting these systems and making their use operationally meaningful.
The last mile needs the same seriousness as the first mile.
India’s food supply chain is becoming more complex at precisely the moment consumers are demanding greater convenience.
Quick commerce is accelerating fulfilment. E-commerce is expanding the number of food transactions. Modern retail is increasing the scale of organised distribution. Processed-food exports are connecting Indian supply chains to international markets.
That makes the last mile increasingly consequential.
The answer is not to slow the supply chain down. It is to make it more visible, accountable and controlled.
Every transfer of custody should preserve three things: product integrity, product identity and product history.
If a product’s label can be changed, its expiry can be manipulated, its storage conditions ignored or its traceability lost after it leaves the factory, then factory-level quality assurance can only guarantee so much.
The recent Maharashtra enforcement actions are therefore more than isolated food-safety incidents. They are reminders that food safety is not a certificate issued at the factory gate. It is a condition that must survive the entire journey to the consumer.
India’s next food-safety challenge may not be making food safely. It may be proving that it stayed safe all the way to the end.
