The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has issued an advisory on perishable food. It requires food businesses to maintain prescribed temperatures for products including paneer, khoa, meat and fish. The requirement runs from sourcing through to final delivery. ANI News and BusinessToday reported the advisory, dated 15 October, on 18 October. It applies to processors, distributors and the quick-commerce platforms that now deliver many of these products directly to consumers.
Food businesses must use sanitary, enclosed transport and food-grade packaging. They must also keep traceability records showing where products came from and how they were stored in transit. FSSAI has directed state food safety commissioners to enforce the rules through inspections. Indian Railways, which transports significant volumes of perishable food, and FSSAI’s own regional directors are also responsible. Penalties include seizure and destruction of non-compliant stock.
Quick commerce changes the risk picture
The advisory lands as India’s quick-commerce sector expands fast. These platforms deliver groceries and fresh food within minutes in major cities. Growth has outpaced the cold-chain infrastructure built for slower, traditional retail. Paneer and khoa are dairy-based products with a short shelf life; they spoil quickly if held outside refrigerated conditions even briefly. Meat and fish carry bacterial risks that temperature abuse can accelerate within hours.
Food safety specialists say the rules target a real gap. Platforms optimised for speed have sometimes prioritised delivery time over the unglamorous logistics of refrigerated handling. That is especially true for smaller, lower-margin perishable items, where dedicated cold storage has often been treated as optional. Enclosed, sanitary transport and consistent temperature control address that directly. Enforcement capacity still varies significantly between states, however.
A broader enforcement push
The advisory follows a wave of FSSAI enforcement activity this month, targeting food businesses across several categories. It looks like a sustained regulatory push rather than an isolated announcement. The regulator’s attention to cold-chain compliance also complements separate efforts in Kerala’s seafood sector. There, a proposed overhaul of port and logistics infrastructure under the Maritime Board Amendment Bill partly aims to reduce the kind of post-harvest spoilage that weak cold-chain handling causes.
India’s perishable food sector spans an enormous range of scale. Large organised dairies and seafood exporters already run refrigerated logistics. Small vendors and informal distributors often lack the capital to invest in compliant transport and storage. FSSAI has not detailed how it will support smaller businesses in meeting the new requirements. Trade bodies representing informal food vendors have previously raised concerns that compliance costs fall disproportionately on operators least able to absorb them.
The advisory sets no grace period before enforcement begins. Food safety lawyers say that could create near-term compliance risk for businesses that have not yet audited their cold-chain practices. State-level implementation will likely vary, as it has with previous FSSAI directives, depending on how quickly local food safety offices issue enforcement guidance and allocate inspection resources.
For consumers, the practical effect should be incremental rather than immediate: better-handled perishables reaching households in better condition, assuming enforcement follows through. Whether that happens evenly across quick-commerce platforms, traditional retailers and informal vendors will depend on how FSSAI and state authorities resource inspections over the coming months. The advisory itself leaves that question unanswered.
The advisory does not say whether FSSAI will publish inspection results once enforcement begins, as it has done with some past food-safety campaigns. Public reporting of that kind would let shoppers judge which platforms and retailers are actually complying, rather than relying on the regulator’s assurances alone. Without it, consumers will have little direct way to verify whether the stricter cold-chain rules are being followed beyond the headline announcement itself.
