A software engineer found something bizarre last week—hundreds of restaurants were running from two non-descript addresses and they were registered under just two FSSAI licences.
Certification issued by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) is mandatory for restaurants.
In August-end, Prashant Baid ordered food online and didn’t like the quality. He wanted to find out if other restaurants were running from the same kitchen. That led to a startling discovery.
He knew the number of cloud kitchens had risen dramatically during the pandemic. And multiple brands use the same cloud kitchens. But these two kitchens, he found, were banking on people trying out food from multiple restaurants, and gaming the system.
“A restaurant’s FSSAI licence number is listed at the bottom of the menu on apps like Swiggy and Zomato. If the licence is the same for different restaurants, it means the food comes from the same kitchen,” says the 30-year-old.
After this, he wrote a script to get the FSSAI licence number and the latitude and longitude of these restaurants, publicly available information.
Analysing the data, he realised that one licence number had 189 restaurants listed on Swiggy and 127 on Zomato, and all of them ran from a single location in Marathahalli.
“After checking the FSSAI website, I found that it was registered by someone called Ramjani Khan. From the data, I found another FSSAI licence from a different location in Bengaluru, and it was running 161 restaurants on Zomato,” he says.
Baid then tweeted about this finding. “The weird part was that many of the restaurant names were similar. Also, none of the cuisines or food offered were unique to be labelled under separate brands,” he says.
Food delivery apps should put in place a more rigorous due diligence process, he says.
When Metrolife called up a number on the restaurant’s signboard, the receiver cut the call, and wouldn’t receive subsequent calls.
What the law says
Food licence consultant Gangadhar Bisleri says that it is not legal to have so many brands under one FSSAI licence.
“In a cloud kitchen, if there are different brands, there should be different counters with different licences. One licence is issued for a brand at a premise,” he says.
A cloud kitchen with an annual turnover of less than Rs 12 lakh just needs a basic registration. If the turnover is more than Rs 12 lakh, it needs a mandatory state licence, he says.
Nowadays, after an application for a basic registration is submitted, if no action is taken within seven days by the food inspector, the
system automatically generates a certificate. “This could have happened in this case,” he says.
Lawyer Indra Dhanush says all food-related regulations come under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006.
“The act lays down guidelines and specifications to regulate bodies that advertise or sell food products for human consumption. Under the Act, Section 50 to 67 deal with penalties and punishments connected to food businesses,” he adds.