Walk into a supermarket in Delhi, London, or Tokyo and pick up what appears to be the same packaged product—a chocolate bar, a bottle of soft drink, or a packet of breakfast cereal from a global brand.
Share
The unequal politics of food quality and nutrition is to blame.
Walk into a supermarket in Delhi, London, or Tokyo and pick up what appears to be the same packaged product—a chocolate bar, a bottle of soft drink, or a packet of breakfast cereal from a global brand. The packaging may look nearly identical, the branding seamless, the promise of taste and convenience universal. Yet a closer reading of the label often reveals something more complicated. Sugar content may be higher in one country, fat composition may differ in another, and the use of additives or preservatives may vary across markets. In some cases, products sold in India may rely more heavily on cheaper inputs such as palm oil or high-intensity sweeteners compared to versions available in higher-income countries.
These differences raise a question that goes far beyond consumer preference. They force us to confront whether globalisation has created a genuinely standardised food system, or whether food quality itself is quietly stratified across countries in ways that reflect unequal regulation, unequal purchasing power, and unequal nutritional outcomes.
At the centre of India’s food governance architecture is the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India. Its mandate is significant: to ensure that food sold in India is safe, properly labelled, and compliant with established standards. Over the years, FSSAI has played an important role in addressing long-standing concerns around adulteration, contamination, and hygiene. However, India’s food system is now facing a very different challenge – one that goes beyond safety and into the domain of long-term dietary risk.
Safety and quality
A useful way to understand this shift is through the NOVA classification of foods, which categorises diets based on the extent and purpose of industrial processing. In this framework, ultra-processed foods or UPFs are not just modified versions of whole foods; they are industrial formulations designed for convenience, hyper-palatability, and long shelf life. These include packaged snacks, sugary beverages, instant noodles, and many ready-to-eat products that are increasingly common in Indian households. The relevance of this classification lies in the fact that the dominant nutritional transition in India is no longer simply about calories or food access, but about the rising share of ultra-processed foods in everyday diets.
This is where a gap begins to emerge between food safety and food quality. A product can be fully compliant with existing regulations and still fall into the ultra-processed category with well-documented associations with obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other metabolic disorders. In other words, the system can ensure that food is safe to consume in the short term while remaining largely silent on its long-term nutritional consequences.
This gap becomes more visible when we consider the rapid expansion of packaged foods in both urban and rural India. Sugar-sweetened beverages, packaged snacks, and instant foods are now widely consumed across income groups. Their appeal lies in affordability, convenience, aggressive marketing, and deep penetration into small retail markets. Yet their nutritional profile, which is often high in sugar, refined fats and sodium, contributes to a broader dietary pattern associated with rising metabolic disease. India now faces a dual burden of malnutrition: persistent anaemia and micronutrient deficiencies alongside increasing obesity and diabetes. The regulatory system, however, still tends to treat these as separate issues rather than interconnected outcomes of food system transformation.
Global case comparisons make this tension more apparent. In several higher-income countries, public health policy has increasingly shifted toward addressing the nutritional quality of diets, not just food safety. Sugar taxes, front-of-pack warning labels, and restrictions on marketing to children have encouraged companies to reformulate products. Chile is often seen as a pioneer in this regard. In contrast, in India, while labelling frameworks exist, their effectiveness is often limited by low interpretability and uneven consumer awareness. As a result, nutritional risks are not always visible at the point of purchase, even when they are embedded in everyday consumption.
Not the ‘same’ food
This brings us to the role of consumer behaviour and information asymmetry. Food choices are frequently framed as individual responsibility, but in reality they are shaped by what consumers can understand and act upon. Nutritional labels on packaged foods often remain technically complex, requiring interpretation of serving sizes, percentage daily values, and ingredient lists that are not always intuitive. In such an environment, consumption decisions are driven more by price, taste, brand trust, and advertising than by nutritional understanding. The result is a weak “nudge architecture” for healthier food choices, particularly in contexts where nutritional literacy is uneven.
At the same time, global food companies such as Nestlé, Pepsi Co. etc. operate across very different regulatory and economic environments. In practice, this means that product formulation is shaped by a combination of global brand strategy and local constraints, including taxation, regulation, and price sensitivity. Where regulatory pressure is stronger, such as in markets with aggressive sugar reduction policies or clear warning labels, reformulation tends to be faster. Where such pressures are weaker or still evolving, changes in nutritional composition are slower and more incremental.
The case of Pepsi illustrates this clearly. In the United States, Pepsi is primarily sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, whereas in several European markets and the United Kingdom, the company has reduced sugar content and incorporated artificial sweeteners such as sucralose and acesulfame-K in response to sugar taxes and reformulation pressures. In India, Pepsi formulations continue to rely more heavily on sugar-based sweetening, reflecting a different regulatory and market context. Similarly, in Mexico, where sugar taxes and front-of-pack warning labels have become more stringent, Pepsi products have undergone reformulation to reduce sugar levels and adapt to evolving public health regulations. Thus, even within a single global brand, the nutritional composition of products varies significantly across countries, demonstrating how national policy environments shape the pace and direction of food reformulation.
Over time, these differences translate into unequal nutritional exposure. Populations are not only consuming different quantities of processed food, but sometimes different qualities of the “same” branded food. This matters because dietary risk accumulates silently.
Layers of a problem
What emerges from this is a three-layered problem in India. The first is a regulatory gap, where food governance remains heavily oriented toward safety and contamination rather than nutritional quality and processing intensity. The second is an information gap, where consumers are not adequately supported through clear, interpretable nutritional signals. The third is a behavioural gap, where convenience, affordability, and marketing dominate food choices in the absence of effective nudges toward healthier consumption.
Addressing these gaps requires rethinking what food regulation is meant to achieve. Ensuring that food is safe remains essential, but in a rapidly transforming food environment, it may no longer be sufficient. A more contemporary regulatory approach would incorporate the nutritional implications of ultra-processed foods, engage more seriously with front-of-pack labelling, and consider stronger interventions around marketing practices, especially those targeting children.
In World Nutrition Week, it is worth recognising that nutrition is not only determined by what individuals choose to eat, but also by the systems that shape those choices. When the same branded product can carry different nutritional profiles across countries, it signals that global food systems are not neutral. They are structured by economic, regulatory, and informational asymmetries. Addressing malnutrition in the twenty-first century therefore requires moving beyond calories and safety alone, and engaging seriously with the politics of food quality itself. Ultimately, the question is not only whether food is safe to eat. It is whether the structure of the food system is producing diets that are truly capable of supporting long-term health.
(Dr. Taniya Sah is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Vidyashilp University, Bengaluru. Views expressed are personal.)