I ORDO

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

13/06/2026

FSSAI has directed food businesses to immediately discontinue the use of metallic pins and wires in food packaging.

Most businesses are aware of the directive.

The question is whether they’ve verified compliance.
Because the real risk isn’t inside your factory alone. It’s in every site that touches your product. The co-packer sealing your cartons. The site packing your finished goods. The packaging/RM supplier following an outdated process. The vendor assuming the change has already been made.

Everyone assumes the change has already happened. Very few actually check.

If a foreign object incident occurs, the consumer won’t distinguish between your supplier and your brand.
Neither will the retailer asking questions.

The real risk isn’t the directive itself. It’s the assumptions that survive after the directive is issued.
The checklist (refer to slide 3) highlights the areas where assumptions can easily become compliance gaps across the supply chain.

13/06/2026

A Soil-First Food Co. Led By Farmers. started on a 4th-generation family farm in Maharashtra. Now ₹250 Cr ARR, 5,000+ farmers, 60+ export market.

Not just a ghee. Bilona ghee, cold pressed oils, stone ground khapli flour, natural sweeteners, wellness powders, traditional snacks. An entire honest Indian pantry built from scratch.

USDA Organic. Ecocert. US warehouse. Dubai office opened December 2025. The UK is next on their roadmap.

But the UK has its own rules.

Post-Brexit organic certification is a separate regime from Ecocert entirely. A UK Soil Association certification is what gets you on a Waitrose shelf not what you already hold.

And the premium organic ghee slot at Waitrose? GOOD PHATS, a British grass-fed organic brand, took that in November 2025. Still listed today.

The brand is proven. The gap is real and solvable. The UK question is still open.

Watch to see the full picture, what they’ve built, where they are globally, and exactly what the UK shelf requires.

At | ORDO, we take Indian brands from national success to global shelves. This is the kind of story we exist for.

A Soil-First Food Co. Led By Farmers. let’s talk.

10/06/2026

Most food brands don’t fail because the product is wrong.
They fail because the category was never properly defined.

Not a marketing problem. Not a packaging problem.
A fundamental business architecture problem and it shows up everywhere.
In the buyer meeting where the retailer says “I’m not sure where this sits.”
In the investor deck where the TAM slide covers three different segments.
In the label where the claims are pulling in directions the regulation won’t support.

Category is not where your product lives on a shelf today.
It’s the intersection of consumer jobs your product solves and the formulation, claims, and compliance framework that makes that position legally and commercially defensible.

The strongest Indian food brands of 2024–25 aren’t single-category plays.
They’re intersections — Health × Heritage. Functional × Regional. Clean Label × Convenience. And every element of the product, from the ingredient list to the front-of-pack claim, reinforces the same story.

That coherence doesn’t happen by accident.
It’s built through deliberate category mapping, claim validation, and compliance architecture from day one.

This is the standard | ORDO applies to every brand we work with.

09/06/2026

One of the more interesting patterns in food businesses is how differently ingredients are viewed by product teams and regulatory teams.

-To a product developer, an ingredient is functionality.
-To marketing, it’s a claim.
-To procurement, it’s a cost.
-To consumers, it’s a benefit.
-But to a regulator, it’s a question.

And that distinction matters more than most founders realise.

We’ve seen businesses spend months refining formulations, investing in packaging, validating nutritional claims, and building launch plans around ingredients that were never assessed against their long-term market ambitions.
The challenge is that food regulations are not harmonised.

An ingredient can be familiar, traditional, and widely consumed in one market, yet face a very different regulatory pathway in another.
Not because it is unsafe, but because regulators are asking different questions.

This becomes particularly relevant for brands with export ambitions.
The formulation decisions made in year one often determine the commercial options available in year three.

By the time a business starts asking whether an ingredient can enter a new market, it may have already committed to suppliers, specifications, packaging inventories, claims, and consumer positioning. At that stage, reformulation is no longer a technical exercise. It becomes a commercial one.

The strongest food businesses we’ve worked with tend to approach ingredient selection differently.
They don’t start with:
“Can we use it?”
They start with:
“Where do we want this product to go?”

Because ingredient selection is rarely just a formulation decision.
It’s a decision about future markets, future claims, future compliance obligations, and future growth.

That’s the blind spot behind Founder Check 11.
Many export challenges don’t begin at the border.
They begin the day an ingredient is approved.

08/06/2026

FSSAI has been enforcing a rule from 2018.
That’s the story nobody’s talking about.

Regulation 11, FSS (Packaging) Regulations, 2018 is explicit: “Newspaper or any such material shall not be used for storing and wrapping of food.”

It took one Mumbai vada pav vendor and a joint FSSAI-BMC inspection in June 2026 to make 8 years of ignored law suddenly urgent.

The penalty exposure under FSS Act, 2006 is real:
— Section 51: up to ₹5 lakh for substandard food
— Section 57: up to ₹10 lakh if there’s a health risk
— Repeat violations: licence suspension
And that’s before retailer delisting touches your distribution.

Here’s the harder question for founders:
Your newspaper packaging might be food-grade certified and fully legal. Or it might be actual newspaper with a brand story wrapped around it.

FSSAI inspectors don’t read brand stories. They read supplier declarations.
The businesses failing inspections right now aren’t the ones ignoring compliance. They’re the ones whose change-control process didn’t flag when someone switched a packaging supplier, updated an artwork, or chose a material for aesthetics without a food-contact declaration on file.

That’s where violations live. Not in intent. In documentation gaps.

Source: FSS (Packaging) Regulations, 2018, Reg. 11; FSS Act 2006, S.51 & S.57; FSSAI Western Region advisory June 2026 — fssai.gov.in

05/06/2026

The biggest blind spot in cocoa traceability isn’t a lack of technology.
It’s assuming traceability becomes important only when a regulator asks for it.
Most manufacturers know their immediate supplier.

The harder question is whether they can quickly produce documented evidence of origin, supplier declarations, certifications, and traceability records when requested by a customer.

That’s where many supply chain conversations become operational challenges.
The assumption is often:
“We’re not exporting to Europe, so this isn’t relevant yet.”

The reality is that supply chain requirements frequently move through commercial channels before they become direct regulatory obligations.

Global brands, retailers, distributors, and export customers increasingly expect greater visibility into sourcing practices and supply chain documentation.

A useful question for any manufacturer:
If a major customer requested proof of cocoa origin tomorrow, how much of that information could be produced within 48 hours?

The answer often reveals more than a compliance checklist.
Regulations create deadlines. Customers create urgency.

This is Blind Spot #12
The blind spot isn’t traceability.
The blind spot is believing traceability starts when a regulator or customer asks for proof.

04/06/2026

India may have just sent one of the strongest signals yet to the future of alternative proteins.

With FSSAI mandating a standardised vegan logo for approved vegan food products from July 2027, the development is being viewed as a labeling update.

It is much more than that.

Globally, many vegan claims are supported through general food laws and voluntary certification frameworks. India’s approach is different. It is creating a structured system that extends beyond ingredients to encompass processing aids, manufacturing practices, traceability, and controls against cross-contamination.

For consumers, this means greater confidence.

For industry, it raises a more important question:

Can your innovation survive regulatory scrutiny and scale?

As new protein sources, fermentation-enabled ingredients, and next-generation food technologies enter the market, the challenge is no longer proving that an ingredient works.

The challenge is proving that it can be sourced, processed, documented, manufactured, and commercialized in a way that builds trust across the entire value chain.

This is where many food innovations struggle.

Not because the science is weak.

But because commercialization demands much more than science.

It requires regulatory readiness.
Supply chain readiness.
Manufacturing readiness.
Market readiness.

At | ORDO, we believe the future of food will be shaped by companies that can connect all four.

Our focus is simple:
Identify promising protein innovations, evaluate their real-world viability, and help create pathways for adoption that are scalable, compliant, and commercially relevant.

Because the next breakthrough ingredient is only the beginning.

The real challenge and opportunity is getting it onto millions of plates.

04/06/2026

Food businesses don’t rise to the level of their standards.
They fall to the level of their habits.

Most founders invest heavily in products, packaging, distribution, and growth.
Far fewer invest in the behaviours that determine whether those efforts can scale sustainably.

The reality is that food safety is rarely compromised by a single decision.
It’s influenced by thousands of small decisions made every day across production, procurement, quality, warehousing, and leadership.

The businesses that consistently earn trust from regulators, retailers, and consumers are usually not the ones with the most documentation.

They’re the ones where people do the right thing even when nobody is checking.

That’s not compliance. That’s culture.

And culture is one of the few competitive advantages that cannot be copied.

SYSTEM CHECK 10
What do you think is the biggest barrier to building a strong food safety culture in growing food businesses?
— | ORDO
Where Standards Begin.

03/06/2026

Most food founders treat lab testing as the place where they discover problems.

That’s expensive.

A nutrition calculation takes a couple of hours.

A failed lab cycle can cost ₹20,000+ and delay a launch by weeks.

The biggest mistake isn’t failing a lab test.

It’s sending a product to the lab before knowing whether it can meet the target in the first place.

Labs should validate formulations.

Not create them.

Before your next lab submission, ask:

“Does the math already say this will fail?”

Build on paper.
Validate in the lab.
Launch with confidence.

What percentage of food founders do you think are still testing before calculating?

This is not mislabelling. That is precisely the point.
02/06/2026

This is not mislabelling. That is precisely the point.

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