When the Label Lies: India’s Supreme Court Takes on Deceptive Alcohol Packaging

India’s Supreme Court fired a significant warning shot at the alcohol industry this week, calling out a practice that advertising lawyers in the country should watch closely: the sale of alcoholic beverages in packaging deliberately designed to look like fruit juice.

The case, brought by the NGO Community Against Drunken Driving (CADD), asks the Court to ban the sale of alcohol in tetra packs, sachets, PET bottles, and other portable containers. When counsel described products like “Bunty Premium Vodka,” “Chelli Mango Vodka,” and “Premium Romanov Vodka – Apple Thrill”, complete with colour photographs of apples and mangoes. The Court’s response was unambiguous: “This is very deceptive.” The Court immediately issued notice to the Union government and the excise departments of all states.

The Packaging Problem

The petition lays out a damning picture of how design is being weaponised. Alcoholic drinks are being sold in cartons visually indistinguishable from the Frooti or Real juice boxes that Indian children grow up drinking. The fruit imagery, the flavour names, the compact tetra-pack format — each element nudges the consumer and, crucially, conceals the product from parents, teachers, and enforcement officials.

Unlike tobacco products, these alcohol packs carry no prominent health warnings — any cautionary text appears in small, barely visible print. The Court had already flagged this in November 2025, observing that such packaging “facilitates easy access and concealment, encourages underage consumption, promotes public drinking and drunk driving, and even enables smuggling across State borders.”

The petition also flags a structural regulatory failure: India’s state excise laws confer wide discretion on authorities to approve packaging formats including “flasks,” “pots,” and “wrappers,” producing a patchwork of revenue-driven decisions that have allowed fruit-juice-lookalike vodka to reach the market in the first place.

The Legal Framework on Alcohol Marketing

What is clearly legal

Advertising at point of sale is generally permitted under most state excise frameworks, though the specifics vary by state and in-house teams should verify local rules. Beyond the point of sale, direct advertising of alcohol in mainstream media (television, cable, print, radio) is broadly prohibited under central law.

On packaging, the Food Safety and Standards (Alcoholic Beverages) Regulations, 2018 — administered by FSSAI and in force from April 1, 2019 — set out mandatory labelling requirements. Every alcoholic beverage must carry: a declaration of alcohol content; a standard drink label; an allergen warning; and the statutory warnings “CONSUMPTION OF ALCOHOL IS INJURIOUS TO HEALTH” and “BE SAFE DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE” in a font size of not less than 1.5 mm. Compliance is mandatory for all domestic and imported products sold in India.

What is in the grey zone — and getting greyer

Surrogate advertising sits in deeply contested territory. Because direct advertising is banned, alcohol brands have historically promoted their products through brand extensions: soda water, packaged drinking water, music CDs, playing cards, and glassware sold under the same brand name. The Cable Television Networks Rules, 1994 created a limited exception allowing brand extension advertisements, provided the ad depicted only the non-alcoholic product and made no reference to the prohibited one.

ASCI’s Brand Extension Guidelines of 2023 impose hard, verifiable thresholds. To qualify as a genuine brand extension, a product must: (a) achieve a minimum sales turnover (Rs. 5 crore per annum nationally, or Rs. 1 crore per annum in states of distribution, for brands present for more than two years); and (b) keep its advertising budget in proportion to turnover — capped at 200% of turnover in years one and two, falling to 100% in year three, 50% in year four, and 30% thereafter. All evidence must be certified by an independent Chartered Accountant. Failure to meet these criteria means the extension is classified as a surrogate.

Parallelly, the CCPA’s Guidelines for Prevention of Misleading Advertisements and Endorsements, issued in December 2022 under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, formally define and prohibit surrogate advertising — including where a brand name, logo, colour scheme, or presentation associated with a prohibited product is used in an advertisement for another product.

What is clearly illegal

Direct advertising of alcohol on television and cable networks is prohibited under Rule 7(2)(viii) of the Cable Television Networks Rules, 1994, which explicitly bans advertisements that directly or indirectly promote the production, sale, or consumption of wine, alcohol, liquor, or other intoxicants. Similar restrictions apply to print media under the Press Council of India’s Norms of Journalistic Conduct, and to radio under the All India Radio codes.

On packaging, the FSSAI Regulations contain two provisions squarely relevant to the CADD petition. First, any food product containing alcohol must be represented in a form that suggests it is alcoholic in nature — meaning packaging designed to look like fruit juice is arguably non-compliant on its face. Second, the use of words like “non-intoxicating” or any expression implying a similar meaning is prohibited on beverages containing more than 0.5% alcohol by volume. Health claims on labels are also expressly barred.

The Enforcement Gap

The honest picture is that much of this has been under-enforced for years. State excise authorities have historically prioritised revenue; even the FSSAI’s 1.5mm font-size requirement for health warnings on small packs prompted immediate industry lobbying after it was introduced. The result has been a market where the rules exist on paper but are honoured variably in practice.

One can only hope that the Supreme Court’s intervention may change the calculus. If the Court issues binding directions, the effect could be a mandatory national packaging standard for alcohol, overriding the fragmented state excise discretions that have allowed this category of products to flourish.

It is advisable to audit packaging portfolios against FSSAI’s requirement that alcohol products be represented in a form that signals their alcoholic nature.