Indian Sellers Collective opposes FOPNL

NEW DELHI: The Indian Sellers Collective, an umbrella body of trade associations and sellers, has strongly opposed the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India’s (FSSAI) proposal of FOPNL (INR), or Front of Pack Nutrition Labelling (Indian Nutrition Rating) Regulation.

The representative body has claimed that FOPNL will lead to ethnic Indian foods being classified as unhealthy; cause severe loss of business to MSME packaged food manufacturers and sellers; and open the floodgates for western packaged food to capture the Indian markets.

The proposed regulation will also make Indian cuisine fall prey to design of MNC’s and will be a big setback to the Prime Minister’s vision of an Atmanirbhar Bharat and Make in India.

Under FOPNL, packaged items will be given star ratings like ‘one-star food’, ‘two-star food’, and therefore ‘good-food’, ‘not-good food’, based on their salt, sugar and fat content.

The food processing industry has given birth to several local and regional manufacturers of packaged food items which include snacks like bhujiya, dhokla and murukku; sweets like gulab jamun, ras malai and barfi or soft beverages likes nimbu panni, lassi etc.

These emerging manufacturers are making their livelihood by selling naturally made food items in packaged form and retailing them through the available sales channels. Since, traditional Indian cuisine make use of salt, sugar, and fat, for various scientific and customary reasons, these items will ostensibly be marked ‘unhealthy’ under the proposed mathematical calculation and expression of star rating system, leading to consumers rejecting them.

Instead, consumers will prefer zero sugar cold drinks over nimbu paani, pastry over rasgulla, chips over bhujiya; rice crispy cereal over poha.

Terming FONPL a blunder, Dhairyashil Patil, President of the All India Consumer Products Distributors Federation (AICPDF), said: “Large distributors and big retail who are thriving through collaborations with MNC and large food companies will continue to sell the reconstituted, western packaged foods in India, as adoption of FONPL will go on to destroy the market for traditional Indian packaged foods.

“However, the millions of small, independent sellers who largely depend on MSME manufacturers and packaged traditional Indian snacks to earn their livelihoods, will have no recourse, thereby threatening their very survival.