Five platforms, three violations, one common thread: Datura seeds, a poison, listed for sale on Amazon, Swiggy Instamart and BigBasket
NEW DELHI: The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India announced penal proceedings on September 23, 2026 against five major e-commerce and quick-commerce platforms, Amazon, Swiggy Instamart, BigBasket, Flipkart India and Zepto, for violations ranging from misleading product claims to the listing of a toxic botanical substance. The action, taken under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, marks a notable escalation in the regulator’s approach to digital food retail, coming as part of a six-month nationwide enforcement drive targeting online food business operators.
The violations cited fall into three categories. Happilo’s Premium Date Bites in Zesty Orange flavour were flagged across all five platforms for misbranding and misleading promotional claims. Milky Mist’s dairy line, including its Fresh Low Fat Cream, Farm Fresh Curd and Greek Yoghurt, drew scrutiny on Swiggy Instamart and BigBasket for misleading health claims and non-compliant product information. Most seriously, Amazon, Swiggy Instamart and BigBasket were cited for listing and offering Datura, commonly known as dhatura, fruits and seeds, a poisonous plant product prohibited from sale under Indian food law. None of the five companies had issued public statements or denials at the time FSSAI made its announcement.
A Parallel Case Against Nestle Signals a Broader Push
Notably, this action against platforms did not happen in isolation. FSSAI simultaneously pursued three separate adjudication cases against Nestle India over promotional claims on its NAN Excella Pro and Lactogen Pro 1 infant nutrition products, alongside laboratory findings of non-compliant biotin levels in follow-up formula samples. Taken together, the two actions suggest a regulator working both ends of the supply chain at once, targeting manufacturers for what goes into products and platforms for how those products get sold online.
Why Digital Platforms Cannot Simply Point at Sellers
The regulatory logic here rests on a distinction that matters a great deal in practice. Section 27(3) of the FSS Act assigns liability to sellers and digital platforms for offering non-compliant or misbranded food, while Section 59 provides for criminal prosecution, including mandatory imprisonment, for selling unsafe or poisonous articles. Crucially, FSSAI’s position is that a platform displaying food listings cannot claim full immunity under the IT Act’s safe harbour provisions if it fails to exercise due diligence, such as delisting non-compliant products once notified.
This distinction plays out differently depending on how a platform actually operates. Amazon and Flipkart’s core operations largely function as marketplaces, connecting third-party sellers to buyers, which historically leaned on safe harbour protections. Quick-commerce operators like Swiggy Instamart, Zepto and BigBasket, however, run their own dark stores and manage inventory directly, which under Section 27(2) makes them primary storage and distribution operators bearing direct responsibility for cold-chain integrity, hygiene and batch-level expiry control, with far less room for an intermediary defence.
The Operational Strain Behind the Violations
India’s quick-commerce sector has scaled rapidly, with an estimated 5,625 dark stores spread across 408 cities as of mid-2026, built around delivery windows as short as ten to fifteen minutes. That speed creates real friction with food safety compliance. Dairy products requiring unbroken cold chains between 1°C and 4°C are particularly vulnerable in retrofitted dark stores where air conditioning capacity and frequent door cycles during peak hours can allow temperature fluctuations, undermining claims like “Farm Fresh” or “100% Pure.” Separately, the presence of Datura on digital shelves points to a different kind of failure entirely: automated catalog systems processing thousands of SKUs from third-party sellers without adequate keyword filtering against FSSAI’s list of prohibited items.
Compounding this, dark store operations face high staff turnover, with annual hiring needs reaching roughly 200,000 workers nationally, complicating consistent training on sanitation standards and expiry management. Regulatory rules already require that delivered food retain at least 30% of its shelf life or a minimum of 45 days before expiry, a standard that depends on inventory systems tracking batches accurately rather than relying on generic barcode scans.
What Happens Next Remains Unclear
Several important details have not yet been made public. FSSAI has not specified whether the current proceedings amount to preliminary show-cause notices, formal adjudication filings, or direct criminal complaints under Section 59, nor has it clarified whether the violations stem from isolated dark store failures or errors originating in centralised catalog databases. How liability will ultimately be divided between brand owners like Happilo and Milky Mist, third-party sellers, and the platform entities themselves also remains an open question.
This is not the first sign of tightened scrutiny either. In the months preceding this action, the Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration suspended licenses for 14 dark store outlets operated by Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart following inspections that found pest infestations, improper refrigeration and expired stock still sitting on picking shelves.
What to Watch
Analysts tracking this story should watch for formal adjudication orders from Additional District Magistrates under Sections 52, 53 and 59, which will determine actual financial penalties or license consequences. Equally telling will be whether platforms update their seller agreements, introduce automated toxicity filters for prohibited items, and roll out the mandatory pre-purchase display of batch numbers and expiry dates that regulations already require. For a sector built almost entirely on speed, the coming months will test whether India’s quick-commerce platforms can match that speed with the kind of verification food safety law now expects of them.
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