Read the test report, not the label.
on Sep 01, 2026Read the test report, not the label.
Oil, ghee, honey, spices. Four things in every Indian kitchen, and four things the country's food regulator keeps finding problems with. Here is what the public testing data actually says, and what a household can check for itself before buying anything.
Most people find out that their cooking oil was blended the same way: not from the bottle, but from a news cycle. A raid somewhere. A recall. A number in a headline that disappears within a week.
That is a poor way to learn something this ordinary. So this piece sets out what the publicly available testing data says about the four staples we sell, where that data is thin, and what you can verify on your own, including the questions worth putting to us.
Four staples, four different problems
Cold-pressed oils
Share of edible oil samples that failed quality parameters in FSSAI's pan-India survey of 4,461 samples. Mustard oil accounted for the highest number of failures.
See the oils BlendedA2 ghee
Ghee is opaque and semi-solid, so vanaspati, palm oil or starch can be blended in without any visible change. Price is the incentive; texture is the cover.
See the ghee 3 of 13Honey
Brands that passed the more sensitive NMR test in a 2020 investigation, although nearly all had cleared the tests Indian regulation required.
See the honey 474Spices
Of 4,054 spice samples tested between May and early July 2024, 474 did not meet safety and quality standards, roughly one in eight.
See the spicesWhat national testing found in edible oil
In August 2020, India's food regulator ran its first pan-India edible oil survey: 4,461 samples, sixteen varieties, every state and union territory, analysed across 43 notified laboratories. Two findings came out of it.
About 2.4% of samples were non-compliant on safety, covering aflatoxins, pesticide residues and heavy metals above permitted limits. That figure is small, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than inflating it.
The larger figure was quality. Roughly 24% failed parameters such as refractive index, fatty acid profile and iodine value. The regulator's own reading of that category was that non-compliance on quality indicates possible adulteration or blending with other oils or materials. Mustard oil accounted for the highest share of failures, in some cases involving argemone oil, a cheap seed oil used to bulk out mustard and one with documented links to serious illness in past outbreaks.
Broader enforcement data points the same way without being as specific. In 2025 to 2026, authorities analysed 2,23,808 food samples nationally and found 40,023 non-conforming, close to one in five, alongside a record 5.2 lakh inspections.
That number deserves a caveat, and we would rather give it than let you find it later. Non-conforming bundles together adulteration, substandard quality, contamination and misbranding, and no food-wise breakdown is published. A mislabelled net weight and a bottle cut with a cheaper oil land in the same column.
How the average Indian kitchen changed
Adulteration is the visible problem. The quieter one is that the default fat in an urban Indian kitchen is not what it was two decades ago.
Per capita edible oil consumption has risen from about 8.2 kg a year in 2001 to roughly 23.5 kg in 2022 to 2023, close to double the 12 kg the Indian Council of Medical Research suggests as a reasonable ceiling. Over the same period India became the world's largest importer of vegetable oil, bringing in somewhere between 55% and 65% of what it consumes.
The composition shifted with it. Palm now accounts for over a third of consumption, followed by soybean, mustard and sunflower. Palm and soybean arrive as crude oil and are refined here: degummed, bleached, deodorised, then bottled. That process exists for good reasons, including shelf stability, neutral flavour and low cost at national scale. It is what makes cooking oil affordable for a billion people.
But it is a trade. Refining strips colour, aroma and a share of what came with the seed. A refined oil is engineered to be consistent and inert. Anyone who grew up with mustard oil that stung the nose already knows what got removed.
The shift from pungent to neutral was not a conspiracy. It was economics. Which is also why no label will ever mention it.
Honey, and why pure stopped meaning much
The clearest illustration in Indian food retail was not about oil at all.
In 2020, the Centre for Science and Environment tested thirteen honey brands sold in India. Nearly all cleared the tests Indian regulation required. The same samples then went to a German laboratory for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance testing, a more sensitive method that reads a sample's molecular fingerprint rather than checking a handful of individual markers. Only three of the thirteen passed. CSE reported that 77% of samples showed signs of sugar syrup adulteration, and documented suppliers openly advertising syrups engineered to slip past Indian standards.
NMR testing has been mandatory for honey exported from India since August 2020. It is not mandatory for honey sold within the country.
We are not retelling this to point at anyone. The lesson is structural, and it applies to every category including ours: a product can pass every test the law demands and still not be what the label says. Compliance is a floor, not a description. So the question worth asking a brand is not whether it is certified. It is which test, run by whom, on which batch, and can you see it.
Spices, where the problem moved upstream
Spices became a national story in 2024, when overseas regulators flagged consignments of Indian masala blends and several countries tightened checks on Indian spice imports. What followed at home is the part worth knowing.
Of 4,054 spice samples tested by Indian authorities between May and early July 2024, 474 failed to meet safety and quality standards, about one in eight. Between November 2024 and February 2025 the regulator ran a far larger pan-India spice surveillance covering more than ten thousand samples, and reported non-compliance across quality parameters, microbial counts, contaminants and labelling. In September 2025 it announced an enforcement drive aimed specifically at manufacturing units rather than shops, on the reasoning that most spice adulteration happens during grinding, blending and repacking, where cheap fillers, undeclared starch and unpermitted colours are easiest to introduce.
That last detail is the useful one. Spice adulteration is not really a farming problem. It is a processing problem, which means the only meaningful answer is knowing who ground it, where, and what else was in the room.
Ghee, and the problem you cannot see
Ghee is the hardest of the four to check by eye, and that is precisely why it is a target. It is opaque and semi-solid at room temperature, so vanaspati, palm oil or starch can be blended in at meaningful proportions without changing how the jar looks. Its aroma, the other thing people judge it by, can be partially imitated.
Standards for ghee are defined under India's food regulations, and detection methods exist. The gap is that they have to be run, batch by batch, by someone with no incentive to look away.
A2 ghee adds a second layer. The A2 claim refers to the beta-casein variant in milk from specific indigenous cattle breeds, and verifying it means verifying the herd, not the jar. It is a sourcing claim wearing a product label, which makes traceability the whole argument.
What we do instead, and what it costs you
Originary exists because the gap between compliant and verifiable is where most of this category sits. Our answer is not a better adjective. It is a shorter, more boring supply chain that can be described completely.
Wood-pressed, at low speed
Our oils are extracted mechanically in a wooden press turning slowly enough that the seed does not heat significantly. No solvent, no bleaching, no deodorising. What comes out keeps the colour and aroma of the seed it came from, along with the natural sediment that goes with it.
Traceable to a named origin
Every batch traces to identified farms rather than an aggregated commodity pool. For spices that means a named grinding facility as well, since that is where the risk actually sits. This is what makes a specific test report meaningful in the first place.
Reported at batch level
An annual certificate describes a company. A batch report describes the jar in your kitchen. Those are different claims, and only one of them is checkable by you.
And the honest trade-offs
Everything above has costs. If we only listed benefits, this page would be doing what the rest of the shelf does.
| What you give up | Why |
|---|---|
| Shorter shelf life | Nothing is added to extend it, so we suggest smaller packs bought more often rather than a year's stock in one purchase. |
| Sediment at the bottom | Unfiltered residue from the seed. It settles, and it is normal. A perfectly clear oil has usually been through more steps, not fewer. |
| A stronger aroma | Deodorising is what makes a refined oil taste of nothing. Skipping it means your kitchen smells like the seed again, which takes a few weeks to get used to. |
| Spices that look less uniform | Colour varies by harvest when nothing is added to standardise it. Uniform red chilli powder across every batch is a processing achievement, not an agricultural one. |
| A higher price | Slow mechanical extraction yields less oil per kilogram of seed, and small-batch grinding costs more per kilogram than industrial milling. There is no version of this that costs the same. |
Five questions worth asking any pantry brand, including us
-
Where exactly did this come from?
A district and a farm name is an answer. Sourced from Indian farms is not.
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What temperature was it processed at, and measured where?
Cold-pressed has no single enforceable definition in India. A stated range, and the point at which it was measured, is a claim someone can be held to.
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Is there a report for my batch, or a certificate for the company?
Ask for the batch code on your pack to be matched to a report. If the answer is a generic annual document, that is the answer.
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Which test was run?
The honey case turned entirely on this. The minimum required test and the most sensitive available test can produce opposite results on the same sample.
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When was it pressed, churned or ground?
Most labels show an expiry date. For an unrefined oil or a freshly ground spice, the production date tells you considerably more.
Sources
- Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, nationwide edible oil survey, samples drawn 25 to 27 August 2020, findings released 2021.
- Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, written replies in the Lok Sabha on food adulteration, July 2026. Figures for 2025 to 2026 are provisional.
- Centre for Science and Environment, honey adulteration investigation, December 2020.
- FSSAI spice sample data obtained under the Right to Information Act, reported August 2024; pan-India spice surveillance, November 2024 to February 2025; enforcement circular, September 2025.
- NITI Aayog and Solvent Extractors' Association of India figures on per capita consumption and import dependence, as reported in April 2025.
- Indian Council of Medical Research dietary guidance on edible oil intake.
Start with the reports, not the copy
None of this requires anyone to distrust their kitchen. It requires the shelf to be legible, so a household can check a claim instead of believing one. That is a low bar, and most of the category still does not clear it.
If you would like to see what our version of an answer looks like, the test reports are the place to begin.
