For the last few years, India’s wellness food aisle has transformed rapidly. Supermarket shelves once dominated by traditional chips, biscuits, and sugary cereals are now filled with protein bars, millet snacks, seed mixes, kombuchas, and ‘better-for-you’ alternatives marketed as cleaner and healthier choices.
Fuelled by fitness culture, social media, and growing awareness around nutrition, terms like ‘natural’, ‘clean’, ‘high-protein’, and ‘guilt-free’ quickly became some of the biggest marketing hooks in modern food branding. A new generation of wellness-focused brands emerged alongside legacy FMCG players, all competing to position themselves as healthier choices for increasingly conscious consumers.
Recent conversations around brands like The Whole Truth have brought renewed attention to how wellness products are marketed and perceived online. The development gained further momentum after the brand dropped its ‘No Added Sugar’ claim on certain products following a notice from the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), highlighting how closely wellness positioning is now being examined. But the discussion extends far beyond one company, reflecting a broader shift in how consumers are beginning to evaluate health-focused food brands and their claims.
In many ways, the category appears to be entering a new phase—one where trust, scientific credibility, and transparency may matter far more than wellness buzzwords alone.
Consumers are reading beyond the label
Akarsh Singh, Vice President - Growth, Farmley, says, “The bar for what counts as a credible health claim has moved significantly, and brands that haven’t moved with it are starting to feel it in their reviews and return rates.”
That shift is visible in how consumers are approaching packaged food more critically than before. Social media has played a major role in accelerating it, with wellness creators, doctors, and nutrition influencers routinely dissecting packaged foods and breaking down ingredient lists for mass audiences. Masuma Siddique, Founder and Chief Strategist, InkCraft Communications, says, “Consumers today are becoming more ingredient-aware, but also more marketing-aware. Earlier, a phrase like ‘natural’ or ‘guilt-free’ could create instant interest. Now, the same phrase can invite scrutiny if it is not backed by clarity, credibility, and transparency.”
Kishore Subramanian, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Strategy Officer, TBWA\Lintas, says the change goes far beyond a passing trend. “Post Covid, how Indian consumers evaluate health and wellness food products has irreversibly changed. Consumers are more demanding of what they consume, not just in terms of its content, but also the context in which it’s sold.”
Several brands in India’s wellness space have, at different points, faced online scrutiny over ingredients such as maltodextrin, emulsifiers, added sugar, flavouring agents, preservatives, or claims around protein density and health benefits.
This scrutiny is not limited to newer-age brands alone.
In 2024, Dabur Real came under regulatory scrutiny from the FSSAI over its ‘100% fruit juice’ claims, with clarification that reconstituted juices cannot be marketed as pure juice. Similarly, Nestlé faced sustained global and domestic backlash over added sugar levels in infant nutrition products such as Cerelac, including comparisons that highlighted higher sugar content in India versus several European markets.
Singh adds, “What most brands underestimate is how quickly trust, once broken, doesn’t come back in this category. Food is personal, and hence, when someone feels misled about what they feed their child, they don’t just stop buying; they become vocal.”
The problem with ‘health halo’ marketing
Marketing experts say the wellness category has long benefited from ‘health halo’ branding, where products were seen as healthier mainly due to packaging, influencer messaging, or selective claims.
“A few years ago, wellness branding could survive on packaging aesthetics and words like clean, natural or guilt-free,” says Gayatri Sethi Jain, Founder of CtrlA India. “Today, consumers are far more informed and frankly, less gullible.”
According to Jain, many brands treated wellness as a communication strategy rather than a product truth. “People read labels, Google ingredients while standing in supermarkets, and are quick to call out brands that over-market themselves,” she says.
That changing consumer behaviour is reshaping how brands communicate.
“At one point, labels like clean, natural, and healthy worked as shortcuts to trust. That’s no longer the case. Trust today has to be earned through substance, not aesthetics,” says Tanvi Bosmia, Vice President - Business, SoCheers.
She believes consumers are increasingly suspicious of vague wellness language. “The category got away with vague health storytelling for too long,” says Bosmia.
This debate has already spilt into mainstream culture, with products like Bournvita (Mondelez India) facing nationwide scrutiny in 2023 after consumer advocates questioned its ‘health drink’ positioning, pointing out its high sugar content (reportedly ~50%). The backlash even led to e-commerce platforms reclassifying it away from the ‘health drink’ category.
The rise of conversations around ultra-processed foods (UPFs) has only intensified this scepticism. Consumers are now evaluating not just calories and protein numbers, but also additives, stabilisers, sweeteners, and ingredient sourcing.
The scrutiny around wellness branding
Unlike traditional FMCG players that openly sell indulgence or convenience, wellness brands built themselves around trust, transparency, and health—a positioning that naturally attracts greater scrutiny. “Consumers expect far greater transparency, cleaner formulations, and stronger proof behind health-related claims compared to traditional packaged food brands,” says Karan Korke, Co-Founder and CMO of The Healthy Binge.
Even newer-age clean-label brands haven’t been entirely exempt from scrutiny, including The Whole Truth, which has faced questions around sugar content in certain protein bars and the nutritional perception of ‘natural’ sweeteners like dates and jaggery.
The irony, industry observers note, is that legacy packaged food brands are often judged less harshly because consumers already expect them to be processed, while wellness brands face higher scrutiny because of their health-first positioning. This is especially visible across categories like protein foods, supplements, health beverages, and children’s snacks.
The communication playbook is changing
According to Darrell Fernandes, Senior Vice President - Client Partnerships, White Rivers Media, the industry is witnessing a shift from brand-level trust to ingredient-level scrutiny. “Descriptors such as ‘natural’ and ‘clean’ are generating consumer scepticism rather than purchase intent. Regulatory compliance has moved from a back-end legal function to a front-end communications consideration. And thus, agencies are restructuring briefs around evidence-anchored storytelling,” he says.
“It’s forcing a level of discipline that was overdue. As agencies, we can no longer rely on broad wellness language if the product truth is weak. If a claim is vague or difficult to defend, it will get questioned,” says Bosmia.
In practical terms, that means fewer miracle-style claims and more emphasis on substantiation, sourcing transparency, certifications, lab testing, and straightforward communication.
Even brands themselves are acknowledging that consumers now expect stronger proof.
Aditi Jain, Head of Brand and Marketing, SuperYou, says, “In the category of wellness or better-for-you, a lot of brands have made big claims that are too good to be true. Brands need to be very clear about what they’re offering, who they are for, and avoid making exaggerated claims that consumers can’t verify.”
The growing scrutiny is also visible at a regulatory level. Manisha Kapoor, CEO and Secretary General, ASCI, mentions that the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) flagged 332 food and beverage advertisements as potentially violative in FY2024–25. Its half-yearly complaints report for April–September 2025 had also flagged 211 food and beverage ads.
Kapoor says, “Some of the most common concerns in wellness advertising include unsubstantiated health claims and ambiguous descriptors such as ‘natural’ or ‘clean’. Even technically accurate claims can be misleading if they create the wrong impression for consumers.”
That distinction matters in wellness marketing, where the implication of healthfulness is often communicated visually or emotionally rather than explicitly.
The clean-label movement is not losing relevance—it is losing the luxury of blind trust. The bigger shift may not be in what consumers are eating, but in how wellness brands are being forced to market themselves. In a category that once relied heavily on clean aesthetics, influencer-led credibility, and broad wellness language, communication is now moving towards sharper claims, clearer proof, and far less room for ambiguity.
