Buy the same brand in India, and it contains three times as much sugar. It also includes artificial dye, whose presence in food products in Europe requires a prominent health warning. A can of Fanta sold in London has 63 calories.
Consumer giants like Coca-Cola, which makes Fanta, appear to have the advantage. Executives also urged regulators to focus on encouraging portion control. Several food companies have filed legal complaints against social-media influencers who have criticized how they market their products in India.
Because they would not prevent consumers from otherwise having sugary and salty foods, she added that warning labels were pointless. Because indian doctors had done a good job teaching their patients what food should be avoided, and they were unnecessary.
India’s food-safety regulator said in August that it had abandoned a push for colourful warnings on the front of food packaging. It said such warning labels don’t account for how Indian cuisine has more intense flavours than Western food and instead proposed that companies display a black-and-white table of sugar, fat and salt content. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India buckled after a tense March meeting with industry executives, who argued that such warning labels were confusing and ineffective, according to recordings reviewed by Reuters. The threat that warning labels pose to profits means the industry is incentivized “to hold out for as long as possible, not informing the Indian public about the healthiness of the foods that they’re selling,” said Simone Pettigrew, head of food policy at the George Institute for Global Health in Australia.
