Red label threatens sales. So, food industry invented a colour problem that doesn't exist

India's food industry told the Supreme Court that red warning labels will confuse shoppers who mistake sugar for meat. The industry's own packaging has used brown for that job since 2021. What follows is built entirely on a colour nobody actually uses anymore.

In Short

• FSSAI changed the non-veg symbol from red to brown in 2021
• The industry's own confusion claim was rebutted in the same case
• A red warning label threatens sales more than any shopper's confusion

A red hexagon is coming for the biscuit aisle, and the food industry has two arguments waiting in the wings. The first is true: this will cost the industry money. The second is more useful: shoppers may mistake a sugar warning for a chicken sandwich. Only the second argument made it into the courtroom.

It is, in its way, a small masterpiece of misdirection, the kind you have to admire briefly before remembering it is aimed at you.

THE COLOUR THAT ISN'T THERE ANYMORE

The All India Food Processors Association’s argument, submitted to the court on September 24, rests on a single premise: Indians are "habituated to associating the colour red" with the non-vegetarian symbol, and a red warning for sugar and fat would therefore muddy that association into something faintly carnivorous.

It is a premise with an unfortunate half-life. The non-vegetarian mark has been brown, not red, since December 2021, redrawn as a triangle specifically so colour-blind shoppers could tell it apart from the green vegetarian dot.

FSSAI did not need archival research to make this point. It made it in the same case, in its own filing, in language almost embarrassingly plain: one symbol is a brown triangle, the other a red hexagon, and the two share no colour, shape, or apparent ambition to be confused with each other.

There is a particular kind of confidence required to argue, in the country’s highest court, that everyone else has failed to notice a change the food industry’s own packaging has been complying with for half a decade. I find it almost impressive, the way one might admire a magician who effortlessly performs tricks.

THE SHOPPER WHO WOULD HAVE TO WORK VERY HARD TO BE CONFUSED

Consider what this argument actually requires of the ordinary Indian shopper. She must look at a red hexagon, summon from memory a shade of red her own grocery aisle stopped using in 2021, transplant that memory onto a shape she has never seen it attached to, and arrive, by this elaborate act of misremembering, at the conclusion that her biscuits contain chicken.

This is not confusion. This is closer to method acting, performed involuntarily, by a woman who has apparently kept more faithful records of India’s labelling reforms than the trade body claiming to protect her from them.

I do not think the problem exists. I think it was assembled, colour memory and all, because the argument needed a witness, and nobody paused long enough to wonder whether the shopper would survive being asked a single follow-up question.

THE SENTENCE THAT NEVER MADE IT INTO THE FILING

Here, for comparison, is the argument that was available and was not used. A red hexagon, sitting prominently on a packet exceeding 3 per cent added sugar or 4.2 per cent fat, will be the first thing a shopper's eye catches in a crowded aisle. Some of what currently sells well under quieter packaging will sell less well under a louder one. Revenue, in short, is at stake.

This is an entirely legitimate thing for a company to say in court. Judges hear commercial arguments every day and know precisely how much weight to give them.

What is harder to say with a straight face is that the label endangers the very shoppers it is designed to inform, and I suspect that difficulty is exactly why the industry reached for the softer, more sympathetic fiction instead.

"This will cost us money" is a sentence a bench can weigh on its own terms. "This will confuse and mislead vegetarian India" is a sentence built to make a bench pause before weighing anything at all. Only one of these sentences happens to be true. The other, evidently, photographs better.

A TRIANGLE CALLED AS A WITNESS FOR ITS OWN MURDER

There is something almost poetic about how thoroughly the brown triangle has been misused here. It has spent five quiet years doing exactly the job it was assigned, distinguishing meat from vegetables for anyone who bothered to look, causing no confusion whatsoever, filing no complaints of its own. And now it finds itself cited, in a Supreme Court affidavit, as proof of a confusion it was specifically engineered to prevent.

Meanwhile, the red hexagon, a symbol that has existed for roughly the length of this court case, is being asked to answer for a colour crisis that predates it by half a decade. It is rather like blaming the new tenant for a leak the previous occupant never reported.

THE ONLY CONFUSION ANYONE CAN ACTUALLY FIND

If genuine confusion exists anywhere in this story, I think it belongs to the food giants who filed the argument, not the shoppers it claims to worry about. They appear confused about how long a colour change remains checkable. They appear confused about whether a regulator that has already made this exact rebuttal once will let it pass quietly a second time. And they appear confused, most charmingly of all, about whether a courtroom is the sort of venue where a claim about a triangle’s colour goes unexamined.

The Supreme Court has, to its credit, spent this case asking considerably sharper questions, whether trans fat is properly folded into the fat threshold, whether one flat percentage can sensibly govern products as different as flavoured yoghurt and packaged namkeen. Those questions deserve the bench’s full attention. A dispute over a colour that resolves itself the moment anyone opens their own catalogue does not.

Nobody who has glanced at a food label in the past five years is going to mistake a red hexagon for a brown triangle.

The only party in this entire case that seems not to have looked closely enough is the one that put its name to the argument, and given what is riding on the outcome, I doubt that particular oversight was an accident.

Radifah Kabir is a food and biotechnologist.

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