India's healthy snack labels are hiding refined sugar, palm oil, and maida behind wellness buzzwords, and Divyashikha Gupta of Millwize has some sharp insights on why.
The next time you pick up a snack that says "made with millets" or "no added sugar," do one thing before you put it in your basket- flip it over. Chances are, somewhere between the earthy packaging and the feel-good font, refined sugar has found a way in. So has palm oil. So has maida. They just aren't on the front of the pack, because that space is reserved for the story the brand wants to tell. The back of the pack is where the real one lives.
This gap between promise and reality has a name. It is called health-washing, and it has quietly become one of the most common practices in India's packaged food market, at the exact moment when more Indians than ever are trying to eat better.
Understanding Health-Washing
India's wellness economy is genuinely booming. Sales of healthy snacks are rising, millet brands are multiplying, and clean-label food has become one of the most searched categories in Indian grocery retail. The demand is real. But a lot of what is being sold in response to it is not.
"Health washing is the modern food industry's favourite illusion," says Divyashikha Gupta, founder of Millwize, the clean-label startup that debuted at AAHAR 2026. "A product does not magically become healthy because it contains a symbolic 5% of oats or millets while the remaining 95% is ultra-processed junk." What makes health-washing particularly hard to fight is that it does not involve lying outright. Brands simply choose what to say loudly and what to bury. A product can be technically accurate on the front of its pack while telling a completely different story in the ingredient list. "The market remains flooded with products engineered purely for shelf appeal and impulse buys," she says, "rather than long-term cellular health."
How to Read a Food Label in India and Spot Hidden Sugar
Most people in India read the front of a food pack. Very few make it to the back, and brands know this. It is, in many ways, the foundation the whole system rests on. Refined sugar is the most practiced escape artist in the Indian packaged food industry. It travels under aliases — invert syrup, maltodextrin, glucose solids, liquid glucose, fructose syrup — so that a product can print "no added sugar" in bold on the front while quietly loading the formulation with high-glycemic derivatives that do exactly the same thing to your body.
"If you want to beat the food marketers at their own game, you have to look at two things: the source of sweetness and the exact order of the ingredients listed," says Divyashikha. Indian labeling law requires ingredients to appear in descending order by weight, which means the first three entries are the most honest thing on the entire packet. "If refined flour, sugar, or palm oil sits comfortably in the top three positions, that product is an ultra-processed food wearing a wellness mask." Millwize's own answer to this has been to remove the variables entirely- no refined sugar, no maida, no palm oil, with dates as the only sweetener. "If an ingredient list reads like a high school chemistry experiment," she says, "you shouldn't be eating it."
Why the Indian Food Industry Still Relies on Refined Sugar
The argument for cutting refined sugar out of healthy snacks seems straightforward enough. The industry's reluctance to do so comes down, mostly, to money.
Refined sugar is cheap. It is stable at scale. It extends shelf life, gives products their texture, and produces the kind of taste response that reliably brings people back. Taking it out is not a substitution exercise — it is a reformulation from the ground up.
"Sugar dictates the crunch of a cookie, the moisture of a bar, the overall mouthfeel," she explains. "Eliminating it entirely requires intense R&D, sophisticated ingredient balancing, and far more expensive raw materials." And then there is the question of the Indian palate itself — trained over generations to expect sweetness at a certain pitch. "Breaking that addiction requires both formulation innovation and a collective evolution of consumer taste buds."
Most mainstream brands look at that equation and quietly step back. It is the harder path, and the economics do not make it easy to choose.
Are Indian Consumers Getting Smarter About Packaged Food Labels
Something is changing, though, slowly, and unevenly, but changing nonetheless. Driven by fitness communities, independent wellness educators, and the kind of scrutiny that social media makes possible, a growing number of Indian consumers are arriving at the supermarket shelf with questions they did not used to ask.
"The contemporary Indian consumer is vastly more conscious and skeptical than they were even five years ago," says Divyashikha. "A growing segment of buyers is actively flipping packages over to read nutritional panels, and question exaggerated corporate claims."
The gap has not closed completely. Serving size manipulation, industrial emulsifiers, high-glycemic loads; these remain poorly understood by most shoppers, and brands are still exploiting that. But Divyashikha does not think the window stays open much longer. "The next generation of buyers will fiercely reward absolute transparency and penalize corporate manipulation. Brands should not mistake this transition phase for a permanent loophole."
Clean Label Food in India: What Needs to Change
India is having the clean-label conversation more loudly than ever before. The harder question is what happens when the conversation has to become policy, when transparency stops being a differentiator and starts being a baseline.
For Divyashikha Gupta, an honest food industry is not a utopian idea. It is a specific set of disclosures. "Every label would clearly state the exact percentage of functional ingredients, the literal source of sweetness without technical jargon, the true level of industrial processing, and whether the micro-nutrients listed are actually bioavailable for the body to absorb."
The goal, she says, is to make food labels easy for everyone to understand, not just experts. "We need to move away from synthetic fortification and return to genuine ingredient authenticity."
"Our vision isn't just about capturing market share in the snacking category. It's about participating in a movement that rebuilds fundamental trust between food brands and the people they feed. We are proving every day that food can be intensely indulgent, commercially viable, and entirely honest — all at once."
It may take a few more years for this to become the standard. But the direction is clear, and brands that choose to lead rather than wait for new rules could shape the future of India's food industry.
source: https://www.indiafoodnetwork.in/top-news/my-mango-is-better-than-yours-984546
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