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I ORDO Global standards advisory for Indian food brands. Certifications | NPD | Export | Process Development

19/09/2026

Know your market

20/08/2026

“Rats and cockroaches are beyond our control.”

The head of a hotel & restaurant association. In response to a food safety crackdown.

I’ll let that sit for a moment.

Pest control is literally Chapter 1 of any food safety management system. It is not an act of God. It is a documented, auditable, controllable process — with a designated responsible person, a licensed contractor, a visit frequency, and a corrective action log.

The moment a business says pests are “beyond our control” — what they are really saying is: we don’t have a system.

And here’s the uncomfortable part.

This isn’t just a restaurant problem. I’ve seen food manufacturers with the same gap — pest activity treated as an occasional inconvenience rather than a critical control point.

The Maharashtra FDA crackdown isn’t the problem. The lack of systems that should have made the crackdown unnecessary — that’s the problem.

Food safety doesn’t begin when the inspector walks in.
It begins when no one is watching.

What’s your read on this? Is the association’s response a legal defence or a genuine blind spot?

Food innovation is moving faster than the language we use to explain it.Precision fermentation is already changing how f...
17/08/2026

Food innovation is moving faster than the language we use to explain it.

Precision fermentation is already changing how familiar food proteins can be produced. Whey can be made without conventional dairy farming. Egg proteins can be produced without eggs.

But I think the more important question for food businesses is not whether the technology works. It is whether the product story still makes sense to the consumer.

When the protein is familiar but the production method is not, suddenly formulation, regulation, allergen management, claims, labelling and consumer communication are no longer separate conversations.

They become one product-development problem.

This is particularly important for founders building products for more than one market. A regulatory decision made late can affect the formulation. A formulation decision can affect the evidence required. The regulatory position can affect the claims. The claims can affect the packaging. And by then, changing one decision can mean reopening five others.

I don’t think this means regulation should slow innovation. I think it means regulatory thinking needs to move closer to innovation.

The companies that understand this early will have an advantage, not because they are more cautious, but because they will be able to make better product decisions before complexity becomes expensive.

That is the question I explore in my latest article:
“Whey Without a Cow: The Food Industry’s Next Trust Question.”

Because the next challenge for precision fermentation may not be proving that we can make the protein. It may be earning enough consumer understanding for them to trust what they are buying.

What do you think matters more here: scientific equivalence, regulatory clarity, or consumer understanding?

No country in the world has approved a lab-grown cocoa product yet.That’s about to change. Companies are already produci...
11/08/2026

No country in the world has approved a lab-grown cocoa product yet.
That’s about to change. Companies are already producing chocolate-grade cultured cocoa butter, and one is targeting US shelves before the end of this year.
I keep coming back to the same question every time a new food technology gets close to commercial: the science almost always arrives before the label does.
Cultured cocoa is the clearest example I’ve seen yet.
Nobody’s agreed on what the pack should even say “cocoa butter” or “cultured cocoa butter” and that one word will decide how much a consumer trusts what’s inside.
I wrote up what I think this means for food brands, for regulators, and for India specifically, where the same regulatory playbook is about to get tested. Full piece below.
What’s your take: would “cultured cocoa butter” on a label read like “organic” does, a claim you’d trust by default or one you’d want proven first?

India moved specified sugar-sweetened and other non-alcoholic beverages into the 40% GST bracket on 22 September 2025.Mo...
11/08/2026

India moved specified sugar-sweetened and other non-alcoholic beverages into the 40% GST bracket on 22 September 2025.
Most food founders I speak to are still treating this as a beverage-sector issue.
It isn’t.
The bigger question is what happens when the same regulatory logic starts influencing reformulation, HFSS classification, front-of-pack labelling and health taxation across other categories.
Here is what comes next and which food categories need to be paying attention now.

Why I built | ORDO? I still remember the silence on that call.A founder I was working with had built something he was pr...
29/07/2026

Why I built | ORDO?

I still remember the silence on that call.

A founder I was working with had built something he was proud of- a sauce, made with care, with a story worth telling. Great taste. Great packaging. The kind of product you root for.

It got flagged over its label. One misaligned entry in the ingredient, and months of work along with savings, time, belief in the product sat stuck instead of on a shelf. I remember his voice on that call. Not angry. Just tired. “I didn’t even know this was a thing I had to get right.”

That’s the part that stayed with me. It wasn’t his fault. And he wasn’t the only one. Every single day, I was seeing another version of the same story, a batch rejected, a shipment held, a label reprinted at the last minute. Different products, same pattern. And every single day, we were all so busy fighting the fire that nobody stopped to ask the obvious question: why does this fire keep starting?

We were world-class at reacting. Nobody had built the prerequisites and kept fighting the internal or clients timelines.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how much good work gets lost this way, not to bad products, but to a gap nobody warns you about until it costs you.

So I did something slightly obsessive. I sat down and analysed over 300,000 recipes, looking for the pattern underneath the chaos. What made some formulations sail through compliance, and others get stuck on a technicality. What made some resonate with consumers, and others sit untouched on a shelf, unloved.

🍏 “Eat 5 A Day” sounds simple, until you try to calculate it for a retail food product. 🤯 For product designers and food...
20/07/2026

🍏 “Eat 5 A Day” sounds simple, until you try to calculate it for a retail food product. 🤯 For product designers and food brands, nailing a “5 A Day” claim is a total math maze. 🌀Why is it so complicated? The Weight Shifts: Standards change from 80g for fresh produce to 30g for dried fruit. The Strict Caps: Juices and pulses max out at 1 portion, no matter how much you use. The Hidden Math: Processing, concentrates, and complex recipes warp raw ingredient weights. Guesswork risks consumer trust and regulatory compliance. That is why we built the | ORDO 5 A Day Assessment Tool! 🚀Our smart system automates the math, applies ingredient caps, and verifies exact nutrition fractions instantly. It takes the stress out of compliance and helps your R&D team design healthier products with confidence. 📊🎯🔗 Ready to simplify your product design? Click the link in our bio to try the | ORDO Assessment Tool today!

07/07/2026

If you look at a traditional supply chain diagram, it’s always a straight line: Raw Materials ➡️ Manufacturer/ Processor ➡️ Distributor/ Retailer.

But lines break.

True operational resilience comes when you stop treating your partners, like co-packers, ingredient brokers, and testing labs as simple, interchangeable transactions. The brands that survive crises are almost always the ones whose partners will answer a phone call on a Saturday. That isn’t luck; it’s an ecosystem.

For smaller food brands and SMEs, shifting from a “linear mindset” to an “ecosystem mindset” isn’t just a corporate strategy. It’s existential.

We wanted to challenge the status quo on how food operations are built, so we put our thoughts into a fresh perspective piece: “The Food Industry Is an Ecosystem. We’ve Just Been Managing It Like a Supply Chain.”

We’ve packaged years of working across sourcing and international trade into a new article. We’d love to hear from fellow food executives, how do you balance the cost of redundancy against the risk of single-source failure?

At ORDO, we’re committed to helping innovative food brands transform ideas into globally compliant, market-ready product...
28/06/2026

At ORDO, we’re committed to helping innovative food brands transform ideas into globally compliant, market-ready products. We look forward to many more conversations and collaborations that drive innovation across the food industry. BOOK YOUR 30 MIN CONSULTATION! at www.iordo.in

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