How to complain about food safety

The Food Safety and Standards Act 2006 replaced a scatter of earlier food laws with a single framework and created a central authority to set standards, alongside state-level enforcement machinery to apply them.

The division of labour matters when you complain. The central authority sets standards, licenses the largest operators, runs national surveillance and sampling programmes, and operates the consumer grievance system. The actual inspection of the shop, restaurant or factory near you is done by a food safety officer working under a designated officer at district level, appointed by the state.

Every food business operator must hold either a registration or a licence. The distinction is by scale: petty food businesses below a turnover threshold hold a registration certificate, while businesses above it hold a licence, issued either by the state or by the central authority depending on size and the nature of the operation.

That licence or registration number is the index for the entire system. It must be displayed at the premises and printed on the bill, and it is what a complaint is filed against. Businesses that do not display it are already in breach, and the absence of a number is itself worth reporting.

Enforcement runs through a graduated set of responses rather than straight to prosecution. Where a food business is not complying, the designated officer may issue an improvement notice under Section 32 of the Act specifying what must be put right and by when. Failure to comply can lead to suspension or cancellation of the licence. Separately, contraventions can be dealt with by penalty through an adjudication process, or by prosecution before a court for the more serious offences.

Standards themselves are set by regulation and cover contaminants, additives, labelling, packaging, hygiene and specific product standards. A complaint that a product does not meet a standard is checked by sampling and laboratory analysis, which is why physical evidence matters so much.

Capture the evidence before you do anything else. Photograph the product, the packaging with the batch number and expiry date, the bill, and the premises including the displayed licence number. If there is a foreign object or contamination, photograph it in place before disturbing it.

Preserve the physical item. Where a complaint concerns a packaged product, keep the packet and its remaining contents, sealed, in the condition you found it. Laboratory analysis of the actual sample is what converts an allegation into a finding, and a discarded packet ends the matter. Where you have been made ill, seek medical attention and keep the prescription and any diagnostic reports.

Note the licence or registration number from the bill or the premises. If it is not displayed anywhere, record that fact — it is a contravention in itself.

File on the Food Safety Connect consumer grievance portal. It handles complaints about packaged food, food premises, and online aggregators and delivery platforms. You can select the business from the listed operators or, where it is not listed, provide the concern category together with the outlet's licence or registration number.

Upload the supporting material — product images, the bill, and any medical documentation. Complaints with images attached are materially more actionable than text alone.

Alternatively, or in addition, call the toll-free helpline, or use the mobile application, which is designed for exactly this and makes capturing images at the point of the problem easier.

Note the complaint reference and track it. Food business operators are required to nominate nodal officers to deal with consumer grievances, so the complaint may be routed to the business first, with escalation to the enforcement machinery if it is not resolved.

If the complaint concerns an immediate public health risk — visible contamination in food being served, sale of expired stock at scale, an unlicensed operation handling high-risk food — say so explicitly in the complaint and also contact the district designated officer through the state food safety authority, because the portal route is not an emergency channel.

If what you want is to be made whole — medical costs, lost earnings, compensation for the harm and inconvenience — the route is a consumer complaint under the Consumer Protection Act 2019, not the food regulator.

Unsafe or substandard food supplied to a consumer is a defect in goods or a deficiency in service, and consumer commissions at district, state and national level have jurisdiction depending on the value of the claim. The Act also created a central regulator for consumer protection with powers over unfair trade practices and misleading advertisements, which is the route for a false health claim on a label rather than a hygiene failure.

The consumer route has advantages the regulatory route does not. You are a party rather than an informant, so you can see and drive the proceeding. There is a defined process with timelines. And the outcome is an enforceable order in your favour.

It also has requirements. You will need to prove the purchase — which is why the bill matters — and to prove the harm, which is why the medical record matters. A complaint about food that made you feel unwell, with no bill and no medical attendance, is difficult to run.

The two routes reinforce each other and can be pursued at the same time. A regulatory finding, an adverse laboratory report or an improvement notice issued against the business is powerful evidence in a consumer proceeding, and consumer commissions do receive and decide food and beverage complaints regularly.

The national consumer helpline is the practical entry point for the consumer route and handles pre-litigation resolution as well as guidance on filing, which is worth using before drafting a formal complaint.

For food ordered through a delivery platform, note that the platform and the restaurant may both be liable, and the Act's provisions on e-commerce and on product liability are relevant. Complaints on the food safety portal can also be made specifically against online aggregators and delivery platforms.

Being realistic about which complaints move is more useful than a general encouragement to complain.

Complaints that move: a specific licensed business, identified by number, with photographic evidence and a retained physical sample; contamination visible in an image; expired stock on sale with the date legible; an operator with no displayed licence or registration; a labelling claim that can be checked against the regulation without any sampling at all.

Complaints that stall: an unidentified business; a discarded product; a complaint made weeks later; taste, quality or portion-size grievances, which are commercial matters rather than safety ones; and allegations of illness with nothing linking the illness to the food.

Labelling complaints are underrated and are the easiest category to win, because they need no laboratory. Mandatory declarations, the vegetarian and non-vegetarian marks, nutritional information, allergen declaration, date marking and the licence number on the pack are all specified by regulation, and a photograph of the pack is complete evidence of a breach on its face.

Adulteration complaints are the most serious and the hardest, because they require sampling and analysis by an authorised laboratory. This is precisely why preserving the sealed product matters: the regulator's finding will come from analysis, not from your description.

Enforcement does happen at meaningful scale — the food safety machinery runs regular surveillance, monitoring, inspection and random sampling, and adjudication proceedings, convictions and licence cancellations follow from it. A complaint is a lead into a system that is already operating, not a request to start one.

Where a complaint concerns a food business run by, or supplying, a government institution — a school midday meal, a hospital kitchen, a public distribution outlet — there are additional routes through the department concerned, and those should be used in parallel because the regulatory route alone may be slow relative to the risk.

If a complaint produces nothing, the escalation is not to complain again on the same portal.

The first step is the district designated officer, who supervises the food safety officers and is the person actually responsible for enforcement in your area. State food safety authorities publish their contacts and most run their own grievance channels.

The second is the state commissioner of food safety, who heads the enforcement machinery in the state and is the appropriate recipient of a complaint that the district-level machinery is not acting.

Where the failure is administrative inaction rather than a disagreement about the merits, a request under the right to information legislation is often more effective than another complaint: asking what action was taken on a specific complaint reference, on what date, and by whom, produces a documented answer and frequently produces the action as well.

Where a state has notified food safety services under its right-to-public-services legislation, delay beyond the notified period is appealable to a designated authority.

In parallel, if you have suffered harm, the consumer commission route remains available regardless of what the regulator does or does not do. Do not treat regulatory inaction as the end of the matter — the two systems are independent, and a consumer commission does not need the regulator to have acted first.

Finally, keep the evidence for as long as the matter is live. Complaints have been reopened on the strength of a retained sample and a dated photograph long after the initial complaint appeared to have gone nowhere, and there is no cost to keeping them.