Food safety officers in two Gujarat cities acted against quick-commerce warehouses within three days of each other this month. On September 17, the Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation suspended the food licence of a Blinkit store in Raysan after an inspection found dirt, cobwebs on the walls and food stored on filthy racks, GSTV and Gujarat First reported. Two days later, the Surat Municipal Corporation fined a Zepto warehouse in the Rander area Rs 25,000 and issued a show-cause notice after finding expired dairy products and stale bread on its shelves.
What inspectors found
A customer complaint set off both inspections. In Surat, the food department found expired Sumul buttermilk, about 60 litres of it according to The Blunt Times, along with bread past its date. Officials destroyed the stock. Gujarat First and GSTV carried the fine and the notice.
In Gandhinagar, the civic body also served an improvement notice. The store can reopen only after it meets food safety norms, and GSTV reported that the licence may be cancelled outright if it does not. The same drive covered kitchens and canteens at 14 hostels and educational institutions in the capital.
Why dark stores draw this scrutiny
A quick-commerce order comes from a dark store: a small warehouse, closed to walk-in shoppers, stocked to deliver within minutes. You never see the shelf your milk sat on. In a kirana or supermarket, a shopper can check the date and the state of the fridge before buying. In an app, that check happens only after the packet reaches your door.
Regulators elsewhere have already found the same failures. Maharashtra’s Food and Drug Administration suspended 14 licences tied to Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart after an August drive across 86 establishments, Outlook Business reported, and Karnataka sealed a Zepto warehouse in Bengaluru the same month, according to Gujarat Samachar. Gujarat’s two actions so far came on complaints, not a planned sweep of every dark store in a city.
What the rules already say
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India told e-commerce food businesses in late 2024 that products must reach the buyer with at least 30% of their shelf life left, or 45 days before expiry, as MediaNama and All India Radio reported at the time. For buttermilk with a few days of life, that leaves little room: a packet sitting in a warehouse for two days may already fall short.
What buyers in Gujarat can do
- Check the use-by date on dairy, bread and packaged snacks at the door, and reject or report anything expired or close to it through the app.
- Keep the packet and a photo. Both cases this month started with one customer’s complaint to the civic food safety branch.
- Use FSSAI’s Food Safety Connect app or your municipal corporation’s food department to file a complaint if the platform does not respond.
What to watch
Surat’s show-cause notice gives Zepto a chance to reply before any further penalty. The larger question is whether Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Rajkot move from complaint-led raids to scheduled inspections of dark stores, as Maharashtra did. This site reported last week on a fake milk case in Junagadh; together, the cases point at weak checks at the points where food changes hands before it reaches you.
Sources: GSTV, Gujarat First, The Blunt Times, Outlook Business, MediaNama
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.