A plant sterol found where it should never appear has triggered one of FSSAI’s more consequential enforcement actions this year, with the food safety regulator ordering Daman-based SDP Industries to immediately stop selling all varieties of its ghee after laboratory tests raised serious questions about the product’s purity. In a parallel action, the regulator suspended the food business licence of New Delhi-based Marche Retail Pvt Ltd for 30 days over separate hygiene and operational deficiencies.
The twin actions arrive as part of a considerably larger enforcement campaign that FSSAI has intensified since December 2025, when it directed all states and union territories under Section 16(5) of the Food Safety and Standards Act to launch a special drive against adulteration in milk products, including ghee, paneer and khoya, following repeated intelligence inputs pointing to widespread circulation of unsafe dairy products nationally.
What the Lab Tests Actually Found
Laboratory analysis of ghee sold under the Shraddha, Shree Saras and Gokul brands, all manufactured by SDP Industries, detected the presence of A-sitosterol, a plant sterol whose presence in a product meant to be pure milk fat typically signals the incorporation of vegetable fat. Testing also found deviations in the fatty-acid composition of the samples, further reinforcing concerns that external fats had been blended into the products.
This finding fits a well-documented adulteration pattern that has troubled India’s dairy sector for years, in which cheaper vegetable oils, hydrogenated fats or starch are introduced to stretch volumes while mimicking the colour, texture and smell of genuine ghee closely enough to evade casual inspection. FSSAI’s compositional standard requires ghee to contain a minimum of 99.6 per cent milk fat, a threshold precisely calibrated to catch this kind of substitution when laboratory testing, rather than visual inspection, is applied.
A Pattern Consumers Cannot See
The difficulty for ordinary buyers is that adulteration of this kind produces no visible warning signs, since blended products can pass every casual check a consumer might perform at home. A separate case earlier this year involving the Tirupati temple’s laddu prasadam supply chain, where a supplier’s ghee was later confirmed to contain animal fat traces, illustrated how even institutional procurement processes have proven vulnerable to the same deception now under scrutiny at SDP Industries.
Consumer confidence data reflects this unease at scale, with recent surveys finding that roughly six in ten urban Indian households lack confidence in the purity of the ghee available to them, a striking figure for a product deeply embedded in Indian households’ culinary and religious practices.
FSSAI’s action against Marche Retail stemmed from a distinct category of enforcement, tied not to product composition but to establishment-level compliance failures spanning design and operational controls, sanitation, food-handler training and record maintenance. The 30-day suspension requires the company to halt food business activities entirely while it addresses the identified shortcomings before resuming operations under the regulator’s prescribed process.
Part of a Much Larger Enforcement Sweep
Both actions form part of a broader campaign in which FSSAI has issued more than 150 notices to food businesses in recent months over misleading advertisements, false claims and labelling violations, with major companies including Nestle India, PepsiCo, Abbott India and Coca-Cola India among those facing scrutiny. The e-commerce sector has not been spared either, with Amazon and Flipkart together receiving 12 notices and one Amazon warehouse licence reportedly cancelled, while food service chains including KFC, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Domino’s have collectively faced more than 30 notices, with five Domino’s licences suspended.
For consumers navigating this landscape, verifying batch-specific NABL laboratory certificates rather than relying on packaging claims or home tests remains the most reliable safeguard, since adulterators typically optimise their products to pass exactly the informal checks most households rely upon.
