Pet food in India: who actually regulates it

A founder building a dog food brand in India usually opens by asking which FSSAI licence they need. Right instinct, wrong question. Pet food is not food in Indian law. That one fact moves the licence, the pack, the import route and the conversation with a platform’s category team.

Start with the definition, because it decides everything

The Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 defines food at section 3(1)(j). Food means a substance intended for human consumption. The clause then lists what the word does not include, and the first item on that list is animal feed. Pet food is animal feed. It sits outside the Act.

So there is no FSSAI licence for pet food, because FSSAI licenses food businesses and your product is not food. If the same company also sells a human line, that line is food and the ordinary licence regime applies to it. The pet line does not come along with it.

One qualifier, because people will cite it back at you. A 2019 direction carried on FSSAI’s own site said the authority was examining feed regulations supported by amendments to the parent Act, and that in the interim commercial feed given to animals producing food should comply with the relevant BIS standards. The reasoning was contamination travelling through milk and meat into human food. Dogs and cats do not produce food. That direction is not about you.

What a domestic manufacturer actually needs

Nothing specific to pet food, which is the uncomfortable answer. There is no central pet food licence, no product registration and no approval step before you sell. You still need what any manufacturer needs: the entity, GST, the local trade licence, the factory and pollution consents your process attracts, and packaging waste registration if you put plastic on the market.

The Bureau of Indian Standards publishes IS 11968, revised in 2019, titled Pet food for dogs and cats. It is a standard, not a licence. No quality control order has been notified that makes it compulsory, so meeting it is a choice. Make the choice anyway. It is the only national benchmark in the category, and it is what a serious retail buyer, a vet chain or an opposing lawyer will measure you against.

What has to appear on the pack

The pack rules that bind you are the packaged commodity rules, not the food labelling rules. Those declarations cover pre-packaged goods generally rather than food alone, so net quantity, retail sale price inclusive of taxes, the name and address of the manufacturer or packer or importer, the month and year, consumer care details and country of origin on imports all apply. We have covered those declarations and how a listing inherits them, and pet changes none of the mechanics.

What does not apply is the prescribed food panel. No regulator sets the protein and fat table, the feeding chart, the life stage naming, or the phrase complete and balanced. That is the trap. Because nobody prescribes them, each is your own voluntary claim, and a voluntary claim is still a representation to a consumer. Consumer protection law and the advertising codes reach it even where food law does not. A claim you cannot support with a test report or a formulation record is more exposed here, not less, because there is no prescribed format to shelter inside.

Importing finished product or ingredients

Here a real permit appears, and it comes from a different ministry. Dog and cat food containing material of animal origin is a livestock product. The Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying regulates it under the Live-stock Importation Act, 1898, and issues a sanitary import permit for it.

Two operational points matter more than the paperwork. The permit has to be in hand before the consignment leaves the exporting country, which puts it in your purchase order timeline and not your customs timeline. And it runs for a fixed window set by product, so treat it as an asset with an expiry rather than a one time clearance.

Alongside it, the veterinary authority in the exporting country has to certify the consignment in the format India notifies. DAHD notified veterinary health certificate requirements for dog and cat food products containing animal origin material through notification S.O. 3926(E) dated 22 September 2021. If your co-packer is abroad, that certificate is their job and their government’s job, and it is the most common reason a first shipment sits at the port.

The scope is narrower than people assume. That regime is written around animal origin food for dogs and cats. A vegetarian formulation, or food for a bird or a fish, sits outside it, which does not mean import policy ignores it. Read the policy line for your own tariff heading the way you would for any restricted or licensed good before you commit to a container. Animal origin ingredients bought in for local manufacture raise the same question, because the ingredient is itself a livestock product.

What platforms ask for before they list you

Marketplace and quick commerce onboarding was built around the human food regime, so the category form often carries an FSSAI field that a pet food seller has nothing correct to enter in. Do not invent an answer, and do not paste in a licence issued for a different line. Ask the category team in writing which document set applies to pet food, and keep the reply. The rest is ordinary: entity, GST, brand authorisation and the standard seller document set. Offer your test reports unasked, because the category team has no prescribed panel to check you against either.

Plan for a regime that is moving

The plainest thing we can tell you is that this is unsettled. There is no dedicated pet food regulator. The import side is governed and the domestic side largely is not. The national standard exists and is voluntary. FSSAI has said on record that it was examining feed regulations with amendments to the parent Act, and industry papers keep pressing for the BIS standard to be made enforceable. Nothing has been notified for pet food as we write.

So build as though it will be. Formulate to IS 11968, keep batch records and third party test reports from the first run, and lay out the pack so a mandatory panel could be added later without a redesign. Retrofitting a label across a live range is expensive. Designing to a standard you already meet is not.

This is operational guidance, not regulatory advice. Have a lawyer read your label and your import file before the first run.