All any of us really wants from a bottle of rum is that it be rum, and that the label say what’s actually inside. In August 2026, India’s food regulator went to considerable lengths to enforce exactly that. What the episode quietly reveals is how much machinery – how many rulebooks, regulators and laboratories – now stands between a consumer and that very simple expectation.
What actually happened?
On 2 August 2026, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) confirmed it had taken action against several well-known liquor makers on two counts: adding flavours that imitate the natural taste of the drink itself, and making misleading age claims.
In practical terms, it ordered a prohibition of sale on a number of products found sub-standard in laboratory testing – variants of Old Monk, McDowell’s No. 1, Bagpiper, Antiquity Blue and Royal Challenge among them. It inspected a distillery in Goa, issued notices to six more manufacturers in Maharashtra, and – this part matters – allowed two manufacturers who appealed to keep selling their existing stock, provided the front of the pack was changed to reveal the product’s true nature.
The entire remedy, in the end, was: “you can sell it, just say what it is, really“.
What were these companies actually accused of?
Some creative manufacturers were allegedly starting with plain neutral spirit, i.e., alcohol with no real character of its own, and then adding “rum flavour” or “whisky flavour” to make it taste like the real thing, before selling it as standard rum or whisky.
FSSAI’s own comparison says it best: this is like adding coffee flavour to coffee, or tea flavour to tea. The taste of a proper rum is supposed to come from how it is made – the molasses, the fermentation, the distillation, the years in a barrel – not from a flavour bottle. If the taste has to be poured in, the honest name for the product is “rum-flavoured spirit,” not “rum.”
The age claim was the same problem in a different outfit. One rum was labelled as a “7 years old” blend when the aged rum in it came to less than 5%, and the rest was unaged neutral spirit. Calling that “7 years old” simply tells the buyer something that isn’t true.
So far, so sensible. Nobody seriously thinks you should be able to sell dressed-up plain spirit as aged rum. The strange part is not the conclusion. It is everything you have to go through to reach it.
How many rulebooks does one bottle of rum actually answer to?
This is where it tips into the absurd. To decide whether a bottle of rum is allowed to call itself rum, you have to consult:
- The Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, which first has to establish that alcohol even counts as “food” (it does – the Act says so in plain words).
- The Alcoholic Beverages Regulations, 2018, which tell you what rum is.
- The Labelling and Display Regulations, 2020, which tell you what the label must say.
- The Food Additives Regulations, 2011, which tell you whether you are even allowed to add a flavour in the first place.
And that is only the food regulator. Layered on top of it:
- Every State’s excise department runs its own separate rulebook for how liquor is licensed, sold and taxed, and those rules differ from State to State.
- For years, the Bureau of Indian Standards has also maintained its own standards for spirits.
Why does “rum should taste like rum” need a laboratory and a legal opinion?
Because of how the rule is written. The standard says rum must “possess the characteristic taste and aroma associated with the product.” That sounds fine until you notice it is a matter of taste – a sensory judgment, not a hard number you can measure.
So proving that a rum isn’t rum-y enough becomes a job for accredited laboratories, whose reports feed into an adjudicating officer, whose decision can be appealed to a Food Safety Appellate Tribunal, and from there to the High Court. To officially establish that a drink is not what its label claims, the system reaches for chemists and something close to a courtroom.
Meanwhile, any of us could have worked out the same thing in about two seconds – by reading an honest list of what’s in the bottle. Which is, of course, the very thing that was missing, and the whole point of the exercise.
And here’s the twist: the rule doesn’t even say what it needs to say
This is the part that should make any lawyer smile. The same rum standard FSSAI is enforcing allows rum to be made from plain neutral spirit. It also says the rum must taste characteristically of, surprisingly, rum. What it never actually says is that the characteristic taste isn’t allowed to come from an added flavour.
That gap is precisely the loophole the manufacturers drove through. The rulebook designed to stop fakery quietly left open the one door it most needed to close, so FSSAI is now left arguing for a meaning the text doesn’t quite spell out. The rule works, but only if you read into it the sentence its drafters forgot to include.
If the answer is just “label it honestly,” why all of this?
Come back to how the episode ended. After the sampling, the laboratory reports, the prohibitions and the appeals, the outcome FSSAI settled on was that the manufacturers could carry on selling existing stock – as long as the label truthfully said what the product was. For “future production”, a clear direction has been passed as to not add identical flavours in the products, such as rum flavours or whisky flavours.
That is the whole thing in one sentence. Everyone wanted a drink that says it is what it is. It took a 2006 Act, three sets of regulations, a national regulator, overlapping state and standards bodies, laboratory testing and a prohibition order to arrive at the answer one could have given at the start: put the truth on the bottle.
So, is any of this actually FSSAI’s fault?
No. And it is worth being fair about that. The companies really were selling flavour-spiked plain spirit as aged rum, and that genuinely deserved action. FSSAI got the merits right.
The absurdity isn’t that the regulator acted. It is that a modern economy has built such an elaborate, overlapping, loosely-worded structure around the most basic promise there is – that a thing should be what it says it is. FSSAI is enforcing a maze it did not design, using rules that don’t quite say what they mean, across a field it shares with several other authorities. That the outcome was still the sensible one is almost in spite of the system, not because of it.
What does all of this mean?
If you buy the stuff: you may start seeing honest names like “rum-flavoured spirit” on some shelves, and age claims that suddenly look more modest.
If you sell the stuff – in any industry, not just liquor: the real lesson is that label claims now carry genuine legal risk. Words like “aged,” “matured,” “premium” and “natural” have to be earned by how the product is actually made. If the product can’t back the word, the word is a liability. And because the rules around any single product can be spread across several regulators at once, working out what you can and can’t say is rarely as simple as it should be, which is exactly the sort of thing worth checking before it reaches a label.
This article is general information on a developing regulatory matter and is not legal advice. It reflects the position as at the date of FSSAI’s clarification and may be overtaken by later developments. For advice on a specific product, label or notice, please contact Bridge Legal India.