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India’s food adulteration problem bigger than cases caught
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Tuesday, 08 September, 2026, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Ashwin Bhadri
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Every time a food-adulteration case makes the news, the story tends to follow a familiar pattern. There is a raid. Samples are collected. Something is seized. A business is fined, a licence is suspended, or an investigation begins. For a few days, people are angry and concerned. And then, as the next news cycle arrives, we move on. But there is one question I find myself coming back to: What about the adulteration nobody found?
It is a simple question, but it changes how we look at the problem. India does not lack food-safety rules. We have standards, inspectors, laboratories, regulations, and enforcement agencies. There are systems in place to identify unsafe food and hold businesses accountable. Yet problems continue to surface in the food we eat every day.
The natural reaction is to ask for more raids, more inspections, and stricter penalties. We certainly need enforcement. But I don't think enforcement alone can solve the problem. The bigger question is whether we are finding risks early enough.
Think about the food sitting in a kitchen or on a supermarket shelf. Milk looks like milk. Oil looks like oil. Spices look like spices. A packaged food product can look perfectly normal. A consumer cannot see most of what may be happening inside that product. You cannot look at a packet and know whether its nutritional composition is accurate. You cannot always smell contamination. You cannot tell by appearance whether a raw material contains something it shouldn't.
Sometimes, the only way to know is to test it. And this is where laboratories become important. But there is an important distinction we need to make. Detection is not simply about testing more. It is about testing smarter.
A failed sample tells us that something went wrong. That matters. But imagine finding the same problem again and again in the same food category or seeing repeated failures linked to the same supplier. Or receiving a cluster of complaints from the same area.
At that point, the individual test result becomes something more valuable. It becomes a signal. That signal can tell a regulator where to look more closely. It can tell a food business that a supplier or process needs attention. It can help identify where a problem may be entering the supply chain. This is the shift I believe we need to make. Instead of looking at every failed sample as a separate incident, we should start asking what the failures are telling us collectively.
A supplier with repeated failures should attract more scrutiny than one with a consistently clean record. A food category that repeatedly throws up problems deserves closer surveillance. A sudden increase in complaints in one area should prompt questions. And a recurring laboratory deviation should not simply disappear into a report.
It should trigger curiosity. Why did it happen? Has it happened before? Is it happening somewhere else? Could it happen again? We cannot test everything. No food-safety system can. But we can get better at deciding what to test, how often to test it, and where testing is most likely to uncover a problem. That is where data can change the way we approach food safety.
Testing tells us what failed. Data helps us see whether it is a pattern. Surveillance helps us decide where to look next. And that can allow intervention to happen before a problem becomes another headline.
For consumers, this distinction is important. By the time an adulterated product is seized, it may already have travelled through the supply chain and reached people's homes. A raid tells us that someone eventually found the problem. It doesn't necessarily tell us how long the problem existed before someone looked for it. That is also why food businesses cannot treat testing as something they do only when an inspector arrives. A responsible business should want to know what is happening in its own supply chain.
Is the raw material really what the supplier says it is? Is the product consistently meeting specifications? Are certain batches behaving differently? Are the same deviations appearing repeatedly? Has anything changed in the process? These are not questions that should begin after a consumer complaint. They should be part of everyday food operations. And this is where we sometimes make the mistake of confusing compliance with food safety.
Compliance asks: Have we done what the rule requires? Food safety asks a harder question: What could go wrong, and how will we know? The second question is where real detection begins. Of course, enforcement still matters. If a business knowingly puts unsafe food into the market, there must be consequences. Consumers need to know that food-safety rules are not optional. But enforcement is much more powerful when it is supported by good detection. A raid tells us what has already been found. A strong surveillance system can help us understand what we should be looking for next. That is a very different way of thinking about food safety.
India's food system is simply too large and too complex to depend only on catching problems after they become visible. We need a system that learns. Every failed sample should teach us something. Every recurring complaint should tell us something. Every repeated deviation should make us ask another question. The goal is not to test everything. The goal is to become better at finding the right problems earlier because the most worrying food-safety problem may not be the adulterated product we seized yesterday. It may be the one still somewhere in the supply chain because nobody has tested for it yet. And perhaps that is the measure we should be thinking about. Not just how many violations we caught. But how early were we able to find the next one?
(The author is CEO at Equinox Labs)
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