How to Read a FoSCoS Food Recall Record (FSSAI Portal)

What FoSCoS is

FoSCoS is the Food Safety Compliance System, the online portal where every food business in India applies for and renews its FSSAI licence or registration. Until 2026 it was mainly a licensing tool. On 18 March 2026 FSSAI added a Food Recall function to it, under an order referenced F.No. RCD-02003/17/2025-Regulatory-FSSAI (being verified) The legal basis is regulation 16(2) of the Food Safety and Standards (Food Recall Procedure) Regulations, 2017, which allows FSSAI to set up a web-based "Food Recall portal". The public part is the "Food Recall" section on the FoSCoS homepage.

Who can put a recall on the portal

Three kinds of user touch the system.

Enforcement authorities: Designated Officers in the states and Central Licensing Authorities log in to create a recall, update its progress and record what happened to the stock, whether it was retrieved, destroyed or reprocessed.

Food business operators: a company can start a voluntary recall itself, and can see any recall an authority has opened against its products.

The public: anyone can open the Food Recall section without logging in and search or browse.

Data published by the compliance firm Food Safety Works for 154 recall records between February 2024 and July 2026 found that 101 (65.6 per cent) were initiated by regulators and 53 (34.4 per cent) by companies voluntarily. Most recalls in India are still regulator-driven.

The fields on a record

Descriptions of the module list these fields. Exact labels on the live page may differ slightly (being verified)

Recall ID: a unique number assigned to each recall. Quote it when you contact the company or the state food safety office.

Licence or registration number: the 14-digit FSSAI number of the business responsible. It identifies the plant, not just the brand, which matters when a brand is made at several sites.

Product and brand name, and the food category under FSSAI's category system.

Batch or lot number, and manufacturing date. These are the details to compare with the pack in your kitchen.

Quantity involved, where recorded.

Reason for recall, sometimes called nature of recall. Common reasons in the data are pesticide residues, heavy metals, microbial contamination, labelling errors and undeclared allergens.

Initiator: regulator or voluntary.

Status: Initiated, In Progress or Completed.

What the three statuses mean

Initiated: the recall has been opened on the portal. The company has been told, or has told the authority, that the batch must come back. Stock may still be on shelves.

In Progress: the company is retrieving stock from distributors, retailers and, where the recall goes to consumer level, from the public, and is filing progress reports. The 2017 guidelines ask for status reports weekly or as the authority directs.

Completed: the authority has accepted that the recall is closed, normally after the post-recall report, which the regulations require within 30 days of completion, covering how much was recovered and how it was disposed of.

Read the status with some caution. In the Food Safety Works analysis, 86 of 154 records (55.8 per cent) were still marked Initiated, 51 (33.1 per cent) In Progress and only 17 (11 per cent) Completed. Nearly nine in ten had no documented closure. That may mean the recall is genuinely open, or that nobody updated the record. A status of Initiated on a two-year-old recall is more likely a paperwork gap than a live hazard, but the portal does not tell you which.

How to search for a brand

Open foscos.fssai.gov.in and find the Food Recall link on the homepage. The search accepts a recall ID, a licence or registration number, a product name, a category or the nature of the recall, and can be filtered by financial year. Searching by brand name is the usual route for a shopper. If you have the pack, the FSSAI licence number printed on it is more precise, because it ties the search to the exact factory. Note that the portal was unreachable from outside India during our checks on 20 September 2026, so we could not confirm the layout of the live search page (being verified)

Matching the record to your pack

A recall applies to the batch or lot numbers listed, from the licence number listed. If your pack has a different batch, or the same brand from a different plant, it is not part of the recall. Check the manufacturing date as well, because some records give a date range rather than batch numbers.

What a recall means

It means the company or the regulator decided that specific stock should not be eaten or sold, and that stock is being withdrawn. Under the 2017 regulations the company must inform the authority within 24 hours of learning that a product needs recalling, and companies that manufacture, import or supply wholesale must keep a written recall plan (regulation 7). If your pack matches, stop using it and return it to the shop. Retailers are obliged to accept recalled stock, and most companies offer a refund. Patanjali Foods, recalling about four tonnes of red chilli powder from one batch in January 2025 at FSSAI's direction, asked customers to return packs for a refund.

What a recall does not mean

It is not a ban. The brand, the product line and every other batch remain legal to sell. It is not a finding that anyone was harmed. It is not a criminal charge, although prosecution can follow separately under the Act. And a Completed status is not a clean bill of health for the company; it only closes that one episode.

The biggest historical withdrawal in India, Maggi noodles in June 2015, was a nationwide order rather than a batch recall, and the Bombay High Court set it aside in August 2015. Nothing on the FoSCoS module today comes close to that scale. The everyday recall is one lot of spice, one lot of oil, one lot of an ingredient sold to other manufacturers.

Why the portal matters

Before March 2026, recalls in India were run on paper and by email between the company and the state office, and the public rarely heard about them unless a newspaper did. The FoSCoS module puts the same records in one place with a public face. Its weakness, as the status figures show, is that records are only as good as their updates. When this site lists a recall, we link the FoSCoS record where we can find it, quote the batch numbers, and flag any record whose status looks stale.

How to read a FoSCoS food recall record