Selling Seafood and Meat Online in India: The Hard Parts

Fresh and frozen animal protein is the hardest food category to put online in India. Not because demand is thin. Because the product was alive somewhere upstream, the standards are written species by species, and most of the evidence a platform asks for is generated inside a plant you probably do not own.

The three FSSAI tiers and what platforms check at onboarding are covered in FSSAI licence basics for food sellers. Where the cold chain breaks, how to win freezer space and how to size a frozen pack sit in cold chain for frozen brands. Shelf life against sellable life is in perishable inventory planning. None of that is repeated here.

Capacity decides your tier, not only turnover

For most food businesses the tier question is a turnover question. For animal protein it is also a throughput question. Schedule 1 of the Food Safety and Standards (Licensing and Registration of Food Businesses) Regulations, 2011 puts two operations on the central licence list by capacity alone. Slaughter houses equipped to slaughter more than 50 large animals, or 150 or more small animals including sheep and goats, or 1000 or more poultry birds per day. Meat processing units equipped to handle or process more than 500 kg of meat per day, or 150 MT per annum.

Read the words equipped to carefully. That is installed capacity, not last month’s output. A unit running at a third of its line speed is still classified by what the line can do.

The second field that catches sellers is kind of business. Form A, the registration application in Schedule 2 of the same regulations, carries its own tick for a fish, meat or poultry shop or seller. A licence showing only trading or retail, with no animal protein activity on it, fails a platform document check even when the tier is right.

The standards are written per species

General packaged food standards will not tell you what your product has to be. Chapter 2.5 of the Food Safety and Standards (Food Products Standards and Food Additives) Regulations, 2011 covers meat and meat products. Chapter 2.6 covers fish and fish products, and it is granular.

Frozen shrimp is defined by the families it may come from, among them Penaeidae, Solenoceridae and Palaemonidae. The freezing process is not regarded as complete until the product temperature has reached minus 18 degrees Celsius or lower at the thermal centre after thermal stabilisation. The standard then says the product shall be stored at minus 18 degrees Celsius or lower and that this shall be displayed on the label. That is a labelling duty arising from the product standard itself, separate from anything Legal Metrology asks of you.

Frozen finfish carries the same freezing rule. Canned fish is specified by drained weight as a percentage of the water capacity of the can, species by species, with a stated tolerance of plus or minus 5 percent, and by a maximum disintegrated portion as a percentage of drained weight. Frozen scallops may carry added water, phosphates and salt only to the extent that the water uptake is accurately measured and labelled.

Two operating consequences. Your listing copy has to survive the species definition, so one prawn listing spanning three families is a standards problem before it is a catalogue problem. And where a product may be glazed, the chapter regulates the quality of the water used for glazing, not the amount of it, which leaves the glaze sitting inside your declared weight unless you decide otherwise. That decision belongs in variable weight selling.

The hygiene schedule is your evidence pack

Schedule 4, Part IV of the Licensing and Registration Regulations, referred to in regulation 2.1.2(1)(5), sets specific hygienic and sanitary practices for businesses that manufacture, process, store and sell meat and meat products. It is not generic food hygiene.

It requires ante-mortem examination well in advance of slaughter, with animals found unfit marked as suspect and animals showing disease marked as condemned, all under a Qualified Veterinary Doctor whose written consent is needed even to move an animal back out of the slaughter hall. Dressed meat not used immediately has to be held in a room maintained at 0 to 2 degrees Celsius. Premises have to sit away from vegetable, fish and other food markets. Inspection points need not less than 540 lux.

If you buy from a co-packer, this schedule binds them, and their records are what you hand over. Ask for the veterinary inspection log, the chill room temperature record and the condemned carcass disposal record by name. A scan of their FSSAI certificate is not the same thing. The wider selection questions are in co-packer selection for food brands.

MPEDA is an export door

Seafood founders reach for MPEDA early and often wrongly. The Marine Products Export Development Authority registers exporters under section 9(2)(h) of the Marine Products Export Development Authority Act, 1972, read with rules 40 to 42 of the MPEDA Rules, 1972, and issues the Registration cum Membership Certificate an exporter needs under the Foreign Trade Policy.

It is not a domestic trading licence. If you sell to a customer in Pune, the instrument that authorises that sale is your FSSAI licence. Putting an MPEDA number on a domestic listing as though it were a food licence is a claim you cannot support, and it is the kind of claim a competitor reports.

What is left is the allergen line and the weight

Fish and fish products, and crustaceans, are two of the allergen categories that have to be declared, which matters the moment a seafood brand also sells a marinade or a masala. That ground is in nutrition and allergen labelling. The declarations every pack and listing must carry are in legal metrology labelling.

The last one is the one this category cannot dodge. You will list a 500 g cut and deliver something that is not 500 g. Decide how you handle that before you launch, not after the first review.