What has to be on a home bakery's label in Bengaluru: FSSAI's packaging rules explained

A plain vanilla sponge, made with eggs and sold in a sealed box from a Bengaluru kitchen, is legally a non-vegetarian product on the label. Most home bakers already know they need an FSSAI licence to sell packaged baked goods. Fewer know exactly what has to go on the wrapper once that licence exists, and the labelling rules trip up bakers who did the harder compliance work months earlier and assumed the box was the easy part.

What counts as pre-packaged, for a cake sold from a home kitchen

The labelling rules apply the moment food is packed and sealed before a customer asks for it. That covers a cake box sealed before delivery, a jar of cookies wrapped for a market stall, or a batch of brownies packed ahead of a festive pre-order. A cake decorated to order and handed over unwrapped at pickup sits outside the packaged-food definition. The line matters because a baker who packs ahead of delivery, the way most Bengaluru home bakers do for route planning and cash flow, is already covered by the Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations, 2020, whether or not the sticker on the box reflects it.

The mark most home bakers get wrong: an egg cake that isn't vegetarian on paper

FSSAI defines non-vegetarian food as anything containing whole or part of any animal, including eggs, so a cake made with egg carries the non-vegetarian mark even when nothing about the finished product looks or tastes like meat. Since 2021, FSSAI's veg and non-veg symbol rules use a brown-outlined square with a filled brown triangle inside, replacing the older solid circle, a change made for colour-blind readers. The plain green circle is reserved for genuinely eggless bakes. A baker who ships both an eggless and a regular version of the same sponge under one green sticker is mislabelling the egg version, not making a rounding error.

Allergens: bold text in the ingredient list, then a separate line

FSSAI's allergen labelling requirements cover eight categories: cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, milk, egg, fish, peanuts and tree nuts, soybeans, and sulphites above 10 mg per kg. Each one has to stand out inside the ingredient list itself, usually in bold, and then repeat in a separate line that starts with the word Contains. A brownie recipe that swaps in almond flour for texture needs tree nuts bolded in the ingredient list and named again in that Contains line, not listed once in passing between cocoa and butter. Where a shared kitchen risks cross-contact, such as a bakery that also handles peanuts for a different order, a further May contain line covers that risk instead of folding it into the ingredient declaration.

The FSSAI logo, licence number, and how big the text has to be

The FSSAI logo and the fourteen-digit licence number both belong on the front of the pack, in a colour that contrasts with the background so a customer isn't hunting for grey text on a kraft-paper box. Mandatory declarations carry a minimum font size of 1.2 millimetres, and guidance on principal display panel size pushes that toward 3 millimetres on a standard-sized pack, worth checking against current compliance guidance before a print run rather than guessing at what looked readable on a phone screen. Packaging under 100 square centimetres of surface area gets some relief from the full label, though the licence number itself is not usually one of the things that relief removes, so a baker selling bite-sized favours in tiny wrappers should still find room for it somewhere on the packet or the outer box.

Batch numbers and date marking: the part cream cakes make urgent

A batch or lot number lets a recall or a complaint trace back to one day's production, and it costs nothing more than a stamped code on the box. Date marking is where dry goods and cream-based bakes diverge in practice. A jar of cookies can carry a best-before date measured in weeks. A cream-filled pastry or a dairy-heavy cake needs a use-by date measured in hours or a day, because FSSAI treats use-by as the point past which the food is unsafe, not merely past its best. Writing best before 3 days on a whipped cream cake, out of habit from the dry-goods sticker, understates exactly the risk the regulation is pointing at.

None of this gets taught by accident. Doodles Baking Institute's food entrepreneurship module in the 6-month advanced diploma walks students through the gap between a recipe that works and a product that is legally ready to sell, because the two skills get taught separately far too often, and a baker usually finds out the label was wrong from an inspector rather than a customer.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Does a home baker need FSSAI labelling if selling directly through Instagram, not a shop?

Yes. The label rules attach to packaged food, not the sales channel. A cake boxed and sealed before an Instagram order is delivered needs the same label as one sold through a shop or a stall.

Q: Is an egg cake really non-vegetarian on the label?

Yes, under FSSAI's own definition, which counts eggs as an animal-origin ingredient. It carries the non-vegetarian mark even in a product most people would call vegetarian in everyday language.

Q: What is the minimum text size for the FSSAI licence number on a small package?

Guidance points to roughly 1.2 to 3 millimetres depending on the pack's display panel size, with some relief for packaging under 100 square centimetres. Check current FSSAI guidance before a print run.