FSSAI’s five claim words, and Nestle’s CEO backing

Philipp Navratil, Global CEO of Nestle, has publicly backed India’s food regulator on labelling. “We welcome consumers being curious about what they eat and what they consume,” he said, adding that “even if it’s not regulated, we would do it, because we welcome transparency.” He said the direction “will keep the population healthier, keep the consumers informed and help them”, and that “we are a food company. We will always move slowly, keeping the consumer at the heart”. Navratil runs Nestle globally and is not its India head.

The enforcement backdrop is the one we covered on 23 August, when FSSAI’s more than 150 notices to leading food and beverage firms over misleading advertisements, unverifiable health claims and labelling violations were reported. What is new here is the vocabulary. The regulator is cracking down on the use of terms such as “100 per cent”, “natural” and “healthy” that could mislead consumers, and the claim words under intensified scrutiny run to “100 per cent”, “healthy”, “natural”, “heart-friendly” and “no added sugar”.

That list is the operator-relevant part. No specific new rules and no deadlines are stated, so there is no compliance date to work backwards from. What exists instead is a set of five phrases that almost every packaged food brand selling online uses somewhere, and a regulator that has already sent notices at scale.

Nestle’s own numbers give the remark some weight in this market. India is the company’s highest-performing market in the first half of CY2026, and Nestle has a 114-year presence in the country.

The practical move is an audit, and it is faster than it sounds. Pull every place those five phrases appear: front of pack, back of pack, the marketplace title, the bullet points, the A-plus content, the D2C product page and the ad copy pointing at it. Against each instance, name the evidence you actually hold. A lab report, a formulation sheet, a certification, a published reference. Where you cannot name one, change the wording yourself before anyone asks you to. This is what an advertising claim substantiation file exists for, and the brands that already keep one will close this audit in a day.