A tin of formula asks for total trust. Nestle's labels may not have earned it

FSSAI has opened three cases against Nestle India over claims on NAN Excella and Lactogen Pro, and a biotin shortfall found in a separate follow-up formula. We explain why a baby cannot read a label, question a claim or choose another meal, making this one category where marketing and harm sit dangerously close.A tin of formula is measured with near-liturgical exactness, by parents who have no reason to doubt what the label claims. (Photo: Radifah Kabir/India Today)A tin of infant formula is measured, not poured. One levelled scoop, water brought to precisely the right warmth, a ritual repeated with near-liturgical exactness several times a day, in kitchens across the country, by parents who have no reason to doubt what the label in their hand claims to be true. That doubt is simply not available to them. It is not available, either, to the infant at the other end of the bottle, whose entire understanding of nourishment consists of exactly what that tin contains and nothing else.Somewhere in India tonight, a mother is holding a crying infant with one hand and a tin of formula with the other, trusting that every word printed on it is true.This month, the precision of that trust met the precision of a laboratory. India’s food regulator, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), has opened three separate adjudication cases against Nestle India, over claims made on two of its infant formulas and a nutrient shortfall confirmed in a third. Each case, in its own way, asks the same humdrum question. Does the tin deliver exactly what the label promises?WHAT DID THE REGULATOR ACTUALLY FIND?On September 18, the authority flagged promotional claims on NAN Excella Pro Stage 1 built around "5 HMOs", or human milk oligosaccharides, and "Whey Protein," and a claim on Lactogen Pro 1 describing its whey protein as "easy to digest." In an entirely separate proceeding, a sample of Nestle's follow-up formula tested below the prescribed threshold for biotin, not once, but twice, after a referral laboratory reconfirmed the shortfall. Nestle disputes the findings, and maintains its labels were vetted by the regulator's own expert committee and are supported by established scientific literature. Three separate cases have been opened, two over promotional claims and one over a biotin shortfall confirmed by two rounds of testing. (Photo: Radifah Kabir/India Today) The regulator’s position, stated with some precision, is not that these formulas contain no HMOs at all. It is examining whether the manner in which such claims were presented complied with India’s rules governing the marketing of infant food, rules written because a parent standing in a chemist’s aisle, an infant crying against her shoulder, is not shopping in any ordinary sense. She is being persuaded at the exact moment she is least able to interrogate the persuasion.WHAT ARE HMOS, AND WHY DOES THE NUMBER MATTER?Human milk oligosaccharides are complex sugars occurring naturally in breast milk, and their work inside an infant is genuinely remarkable. They nourish the beneficial bacteria colonising a developing gut, and they behave as decoys, binding to the very surfaces certain pathogens use to gain a foothold, so the pathogen is carried harmlessly away rather than left to take hold.Here is what few readers are told. Breast milk does not contain five oligosaccharides. It contains well over a hundred, in proportions that shift week by week as the infant grows, calibrated by a mother's own biology in ways science has still not fully mapped. Breast milk contains well over a hundred human milk oligosaccharides in shifting proportions, so a formula built on five is a simplification, not a copy. (Photo: Radifah Kabir/India Today) A formula built upon five synthesised HMOs is not a miniature rendering of breast milk. It is a considered simplification, and there is nothing inherently dishonest in offering one; a formula has always been exactly that. The narrower, more exacting question the regulator is asking is this.Does the phrase "5 HMOs," printed prominently across a tin, tell a parent what she genuinely needs to know, or does it borrow the quiet authority of breast milk's extraordinary complexity to sell something built on a fraction of it?WHY DOES 'EASY TO DIGEST' CARRY REAL WEIGHT?To an adult, "easy to digest" reads as the softest kind of marketing filler, the sort of phrase that would mean almost nothing printed on a packet of biscuits. On an infant formula, it is a specific physiological claim, and it must be true.A newborn's gut is not a smaller edition of an adult's. Its enzyme systems remain unfinished, its intestinal lining considerably more permeable, and how a protein is structured, whether whey or casein, whether left intact or gently broken down, genuinely alters how much strain digestion places on that unfinished system. A newborn's gut is still unfinished, and how a protein is structured genuinely alters the strain digestion places upon it. (Photo: Radifah Kabir/India Today) Certain formulas use partially hydrolysed whey precisely because it eases this burden. A product claiming easy digestibility without the formulation to support that claim causes harm that is anything but abstract.It surfaces as a fussier, more uncomfortable infant, and a parent, working from the label alone, with no way of understanding why.WHY LOW BIOTIN MATTERS MORE HERE THAN ANYWHERE ELSEBiotin, or vitamin B7, is among the quieter vitamins. It rarely makes headlines, because most adult diets are varied enough that a genuine shortfall almost never occurs.It plays an essential role in metabolising fats, carbohydrates and proteins, precisely the processes upon which a growing infant depends to convert every feed into weight, into a developing brain, into cells dividing and specialising correctly. An adult's varied diet quietly closes a biotin shortfall; a formula-fed infant has no second source standing behind the tin. (Photo: Radifah Kabir/India Today) An adult on a mildly biotin-poor diet has dozens of other foods quietly closing that gap, unnoticed. A formula-fed infant has none of that redundancy. The tin is the entire diet, in its totality, with no dietary breadth standing behind it to compensate for a shortfall in front.This is precisely why regulations prescribe a minimum, and precisely why a sample testing beneath that minimum, confirmed twice, is not a clerical footnote. It is the one nutrient an infant cannot obtain by any other route, found wanting in the one product designed expressly to supply it.WHY IS THIS CATEGORY HELD TO A DIFFERENT STANDARD?Because the entire architecture of ordinary consumer protection presumes a shopper capable, at least in some small measure, of protecting themselves, by reading, by comparing, by doubting. Infant nutrition strips away every one of those safeguards simultaneously. While the parent buying the product can read the label, misleading claims make them believe they are choosing the right item.The consumer, who is an infant, cannot read the label. Cannot weigh it against yesterday's feed. Cannot report that something felt wrong. All that remains to them is growth, or its absence, arising entirely from what the tin contains. Infant nutrition strips away every safeguard ordinary consumer protection assumes, since the consumer cannot read, compare or report what feels wrong. (Photo: Radifah Kabir/India Today) That is the quiet reasoning beneath Section 3 of India's Infant Milk Substitutes Act, 1992, restricting how such products may be promoted at all, and beneath the newer infant nutrition regulations the authority is applying in this instance.Not caution for its own sake, but an acknowledgment that this is the one category of food in the country where a misleading word on a label and a genuine physiological harm stand closer together than almost anywhere else.WHAT SHOULD THIS EPISODE ACTUALLY CHANGE?Adjudication is not a verdict, and Nestle's rebuttal deserves to be weighed on its own merits rather than dismissed simply because the allegation is grave.But the pattern threading through these three cases, complex nutrition science compressed into a persuasive number, a physiological claim asserted without a formulation visibly built to support it, and a nutrient falling short not once but twice, is a pattern worth naming with clarity.It suggests a company treating infant formula labelling with the same marketing instincts used to sell a breakfast cereal, in a category that permits no such margin for error.A protein bar may promise slightly more than it delivers, and the disappointment is absorbed, quietly, along with the bar. An infant formula that promises slightly more than it delivers leaves that disappointment lodged in a body with no capacity to compensate for it, and a parent with no means of ever discovering precisely what went missing.That, stated as plainly as the science permits, is the entire case.The distance between the claim and the truth must close to nothing in this one category, because the infant on the far side of that distance cannot close it themselves.Radifah Kabir is a food and biotechnologist.- EndsPublished By: Radifah KabirPublished On: Sep 22, 2026 09:42 IST