The Delhi High Court on Tuesday expressed concerns over the sale of expired food products that are reintroduced in the markets after repackaging and re-branding with new expiry dates and said that people cannot be made to consume "adulterated" food items. The high court said no one can be allowed to sell expired items and this cannot be a business. "People cannot be having adulterated food in Delhi.
Give us suggestions on how this can be tackled," a bench of Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela said. The bench was hearing a public interest litigation which was initiated on its own after several such instances of expired products being repackaged with new expiry dates came to light. Advocate Shwetasree Mazumdar, who was assisting the court as amicus curiae, submitted her report and suggested that a QR code could be generated by the manufacturers for all packed food items which would help in tracking the original expiry dates of the products.
She said legislation dealing with the issue is already in place but the penalties prescribed for violations are not deterrent and they be revisited to ensure greater deterrence. "Food business operators be directed to mark all food products with a unique alphanumeric code or a QR code that is identifiable by an FSSAI representative by cross-reference to a centralised database, which will reveal the batch number and expiry date of a product immediately and on site, to obviate testing and sampling to ascertain whether expiry .