From Safety to Competitive Advantage: India's TIC Sector as the Backbone of a Resilient and Trusted Food Ecosystem

India's food sector stands at a pivotal moment. Rising exports, evolving consumer expectations, increasingly complex global supply chains, and fast-moving new technologies are reshaping what food safety means in practice? and what it demands of industry and regulators alike.

Between August 2024 and October 2025, TIC Council India convened five E-Food Dialogues, bringing together regulators, scientists, industry leaders, certification bodies, and TIC professionals to examine the most pressing challenges facing India's food safety ecosystem. Across sessions on crisis preparedness, emerging contaminants, certification, science-based risk assessment, and data-driven decision-making, panellists surfaced hard numbers, on-the-ground realities, and proven solutions from practitioners at every node of the food value chain? from fisheries and farms to laboratories, export desks, and Codex committee rooms.

This paper consolidates the findings of all five dialogues into a single, evidence-based position for the TIC sector, government ministries, and regulatory bodies.

The dialogue series surfaced five interconnected realities shaping India's food safety landscape:

  • Global supply chains, local fragility. Food systems worldwide remain vulnerable to geopolitical and climate shocks, and India is no exception.
  • Reactive, not proactive, testing infrastructure. Time and again, India has had to build laboratory capacity only after a new contaminant becomes a mandatory export requirement.
  • Underused certification. Fewer than half of India's food businesses hold even a basic licence, despite clear evidence that certification reduces recalls and unlocks new markets.
  • Hazard-based thinking, not risk-based. India's food safety system still largely asks whether a substance is present, rather than at what level it poses genuine harm.
  • An untapped data asset. India's laboratories generate hundreds of thousands of test results every month — a resource that remains siloed rather than turned into national risk intelligence.
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The TIC Sector's Six Roles

The dialogues identified six roles the TIC sector is positioned to play in strengthening India's food safety governance:

  • The Invisible Arm — present at every node of the food chain, but absent from policy frameworks and crisis protocols.
  • Crisis First Responder — supplier verification and audit records as the fastest route to contamination tracing.
  • Technology Validator — independent validation of AI tools, rapid detection kits, and digital monitoring systems.
  • Certification Gateway — GFSI-benchmarked schemes as the primary mechanism unlocking global market access.
  • Data-to-Intelligence Converter — turning laboratory data into risk maps and contaminant trend lines.
  • Global Standards Setter — contributing Indian data and expertise to Codex, ISO, and BIS standard-setting.
 
Six Recommendations for Government, Regulators, and the TIC Sector

The paper sets out six concrete recommendations, including formally integrating TIC laboratories into FSSAI's Food Safety Response System, funding proactive contaminant-readiness partnerships, creating a national anonymised food safety data platform, mandating risk-based enforcement, driving certification adoption through economic incentives, and institutionalising TIC participation in global standard-setting bodies.

Read the full recommendations in the paper.

 
A Call to Action

The five E-Food Dialogues converge on a single, consistent message: India's ambitions (for Viksit Bharat 2047, for continued growth in food exports, and for a domestic consumer who deserves the same quality standards as export markets) will not be achieved through regulation alone. They require a fully empowered, formally recognised, and adequately resourced TIC sector at the centre of national food safety governance.

TIC Council India calls on FSSAI, APEDA, EIC, BIS, MOFPI, NABL, and NABCB to treat TIC not as a vendor category, but as a governance partner, and on the TIC sector itself to invest in the science, data infrastructure, and institutional presence this role demands.

Download the full paper.