According to the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), a cloud kitchen’s registered entity can supply its products to “innumerable brands as long as it complies with the norms and the E-commerce platforms are obliged to display the FSSAI licence and registration number of the concerned entity on their platforms.”
The food regulator’s response came after a writer on Substack, a publishing platform for independent authors, had revealed that a person was allegedly running hundreds of fake brands from a single cloud kitchen and spamming food aggregators with restaurant listings.
FSSAI stated that any non-compliance related to food safety, misbranding, and substandard nature of food should be reported to FSSAI via the ‘Food Safety Connect’ mobile app, and in the case of cloud kitchens, FSSAI is committed to taking action against any reported food safety issue irrespective of the number of brands being managed, operated, or owned by the food business operator.
Prashant Baid, the author of the report on Substack, said that an operator was running 200 brands each out of two cloud kitchens in Bengaluru. In his post, Baid pointed out that the brand names operated by the cloud kitchen sounded similar or identical to other popular restaurants. “This may dupe the customer by appearing on top of the search results if the original restaurant is unavailable for delivery at that location,” he wrote. “Creating hundreds of fake restaurant brands on these platforms shouldn’t be so easy.”