Food safety, excise commissioners to enforce norms for alcoholic beverages

With the new regulations for alcoholic beverages notified by the FSSAI, coming into effect from April 1, the excise commissioners and food safety commissioners will be working closely to enforce these regulations at the State-level.

Since alcohol-beverage makers have been allowed to use old unused labels and printed cans for the next six months, the labelling norms for alcoholic beverages, which include putting a mandatory statutory warning, will only get implemented from October 1. The alcohol-beverage makers will need to get requisite approvals from the Excise Department for making changes in their labels.

Pawan Agarwal, CEO, FSSAI, said, “The implementation of standards for alcoholic beverages sector is a significant step to improve the quality and safety of these beverages. Thus far, the sector was primarily being regulated by the excise commissioners and they were only looking at the alcohol content and presence of toxic substances in alcohol. Now there are far more elaborate standards benchmarked with global standards, while in certain cases, Indian standards have also been kept into consideration.”

Agarwal said that the excise commissioners and food safety commissioners along with their field staff can now enforce these standards.“The challenge was how these two departments collaborate so that they do not put extra burden of compliance on these businesses. But we had a meeting recently of the food safety commissioners and excise commissioners and in most cases they are already working together and it shouldn’t be too difficult.,” he added.

Talking about labelling norms for alcohol-beverage makers, Agarwal said the norms will come into effect from October 1. “Meanwhile, the alcohol-beverage makers will take the necessary approvals from excise commissioners to make changes on the labels. We are not making any changes regarding norms for languages on labels as in some states it needs to be written in English while in other states it needs to be written in both English and local languages,” he added.

Earlier craft brewers had raised concerns regarding the yeast parameters notified in the regulations. FSSAI’s scientific panel will deliberate further on the yeast content norms for beer makers to come out with specific recommendations in due course of time.

The FSSAI CEO was speaking on the sidelines of an event to mark the formal release of the EAT-Lancet Commission’s Food Planet Health report in India. Authored by 37 international experts, including two from India, brought together by EAT, the science-based global platform for food system transformation, and Lancet , a peer-reviewed general medical journal, the report has proposed scientific targets for what constitutes a healthy diet derived from a sustainable food system.

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