Sold Expired Food? Seller Liability, FSSAI Rules and Consumer Remedies in India

Selling expired food is not a lapse of courtesy; it is a breach of statutory duty, and in July 2026 two consumer commissions said so against two of India's biggest retail names in the same week. In Kurnool, Vishal Mega Mart was held liable for selling expired Maggi noodles. In Kangra, Reliance Retail was held liable for expired instant noodles, with the commission stating plainly that retailers cannot shift the burden onto consumers to check expiry dates. This guide explains the legal architecture behind those rulings: the seller's duties under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 (FSSA) and FSSAI's labelling regulations, the product liability chapter of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, the criminal exposure for unsafe food, and the exact, practical sequence for a consumer who finds an expired product in the shopping bag, from photographing the label to collecting compensation.

Key takeaway: the legal duty to keep expired stock off the shelf sits entirely on the seller. The customer's duty is to pay the bill. Every argument built on "you should have checked before buying" now runs into two 2026 rulings that rejected it in terms.

The twin July 2026 rulings, and why they matter beyond noodles

Both cases were small in money and large in principle. In each, the consumer bought packaged noodles past their date marking, kept the bill and the packet, and filed before the district commission. The retailers ran the traditional defences: the customer should have checked; the quantity was trivial; no harm was actually suffered. Both commissions rejected the frame. The Kangra commission's formulation travels furthest: a retailer with thousands of SKUs has chosen the business of managing them, and cannot outsource its statutory shelf-hygiene duty to a shopper in aisle six.

Why do such cases matter? Because expired food is a health hazard sold at full price, because the amounts are small enough that almost nobody litigates, and because every order like these forces the next store audit. Consumer law works in aggregates: one ₹10,000 award changes the compliance calculus for a chain with a thousand stores.

The seller's statutory duties: FSSA 2006 and FSSAI labelling law

The Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 is the spine. The provisions every retailer is measured against:

• Section 26 places the primary responsibility on every food business operator to ensure food satisfies the Act at all stages, including sale. A retailer is a food business operator; the duty is not the manufacturer's alone.
• Section 3's definition of "unsafe food" and the labelling regulations make date marking, "use by" or "expiry date", mandatory on packaged food; sale past that date is prohibited.
• Penalties scale with culpability: selling sub-standard food attracts penalties up to ₹5 lakh (Section 51), misbranded food up to ₹3 lakh (Section 52), and unsafe food is a criminal offence under Section 59, with imprisonment that scales upward if the food causes injury or death.
• Every packaged item must also carry batch number, FSSAI licence number, and net quantity under the Legal Metrology framework; missing or tampered date labels are independent violations.

Enforcement runs through the state's Food Safety Officers and Designated Officer, to whom any consumer can complain directly (FSSAI's Food Safety Connect channels take complaints online). That is the regulatory track; it punishes the seller. Compensation for you runs through the consumer track.

The consumer track: deficiency, unfair trade practice and product liability

The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 gives an expired-product buyer three overlapping hooks:

• Defect and deficiency: an expired product is a defective good, and selling it is a deficiency in the sale service. This is the classic route the noodle cases used.
• Unfair trade practice: offering for sale goods that do not comply with mandatory standards misleads the consumer about their fitness; commissions treat expired stock on an open shelf as exactly that.
• Product liability (Chapter VI, Sections 82 to 87): where the expired product causes actual harm, food poisoning, an allergic episode, a child's hospitalisation, the 2019 Act's product liability chapter lets you sue the product seller directly. Section 86 fixes sellers with liability where, among other things, they exercised substantial control over the product's storage or sale, altered or failed to maintain it, or the manufacturer cannot be identified. Storage past expiry is the textbook case of a seller-side failure.

Route	When it fits	What you recover
FSSAI / Food Safety Officer complaint	Any expired or unsafe food sale, harm or not	Penalties on the seller; enforcement action; no compensation to you
Consumer commission: defect / unfair trade practice	Expired product bought; no serious injury	Refund, compensation for hazard and harassment, litigation costs
Consumer commission: product liability	Actual harm caused by the product	Full compensatory damages: medical costs, loss, suffering
Criminal complaint (FSSA S.59)	Unsafe food, especially where injury results	Prosecution of the operator; runs parallel to your claim

The evidence: five minutes at the store decides the case

Every one of these cases is won or lost on a handful of documents created within minutes of the purchase:

• The bill. It proves the purchase, the date, and the seller. Card or UPI records corroborate.
• The packet, unopened if possible, with the date marking intact. Do not discard it, do not consume the contents once the date is noticed.
• Photographs the same day: the date label, the batch number, the bill, ideally together in one frame with a timestamp.
• The store complaint: tell the outlet in writing (their app, email, or the complaint book) and keep the acknowledgment. Refusal to acknowledge is itself useful evidence.
• If anyone consumed it and fell ill: medical records and, where feasible, preservation of the remaining sample; in serious cases the Food Safety Officer can have samples analysed by an accredited lab.

Common mistake: accepting the counter staff's instant offer of a replacement packet and walking away. A replacement is not the remedy for being sold a health hazard; it is the erasure of your evidence. Take the replacement if you wish, but photograph everything first and put the complaint in writing anyway.

Filing the case: forum, fees, limitation

District commissions hear claims up to ₹50 lakh; expired-product cases almost always belong there, and claims up to ₹5 lakh carry no filing fee. File where you live, where the seller operates, or where the cause of action arose, on the e-Daakhil portal or at the registry, within two years. Plead the purchase, the date marking, the statutory duties, and value the claim sensibly: refund, a compensation figure proportionate to the hazard and conduct (the noodle cases show commissions will not laugh small claims out of the room), and costs. No lawyer is required at this level, though a crisply drafted complaint shortens everything. The wider filing mechanics, including how hearings proceed and appeals lie, are covered in our step-by-step guide to filing a consumer complaint in India.

And if the seller's response to your complaint is silence or a shrug, remember the range of what consumer forums will do when deficiency is proved and documented: the same fortnight as the noodle rulings, the NCDRC upheld ₹20 lakh against Air India over a defective business-class seat. Forums calibrate to the facts; they do not calibrate to the seller's size.

A practice note for businesses on the other side of this

For retailers and D2C sellers reading this from the compliance chair: expiry-date liability is a systems problem with a systems fix. First-expiry-first-out shelf rotation with logged audits, automated recall of date-expired SKUs at billing (the point-of-sale system should simply refuse to bill an expired barcode), and a written markdown-and-destroy protocol will together eliminate nearly every one of these cases. When a complaint still arrives, the worst possible response is the one both retailers ran in July: blaming the customer. The commissions have now priced that argument, and every future complainant will cite these orders. Respond, refund, document the corrective step, and the ₹10,000 problem stays a ₹10,000 problem.

Frequently Asked Questions

This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Specific situations need specific counsel.