India Food Stats

There’s something comforting about a packet of coconut cookies. The name alone promises a little tropical escape in every bite. But one of the more interesting parts of modern snacking isn’t the crunch — it’s what happens when you actually flip the pack over. According to the product listing on Open Food Facts , the ingredients for Americana Coconut Cookies read: refined wheat flour (maida), sugar, refined palm oil, invert syrup, coconut powder (1.96%), leavening agents [503(ii) & 500(ii)], edible starch, edible common salt, emulsifiers [322 & 471], acidity regulator [450(i)], artificial flavouring substances (butter & coconut), and preservative (223). That it is a coconut cookie is technically correct but that 1.96% coconut powder figure is hard not to smile at. The cookies still deliver a clear coconut flavour, helped along by the artificial flavouring, while the bulk of the recipe is the familiar cast of flour, sugar and palm oil that most biscuits rely on. It’s a neat r...

Shrinkflation is a term used to describe the practice of reducing the size or quantity of a product while keeping its price the same or increasing it slightly.  Open Food Facts helped me spot that Sunfeast Marie Light Active Mega Family Pack was all of 1 kg in 2023.  Image source:  Open Food Facts The "Mega Family Pack" downsized to  956 grams now in 2025 . There was a change in barcode , ingredients & nutrients. It had slightly more fat and sugar. In 2026, it has further shrunk to 924 grams. Looks like 1kg but you'll know only  the actual weight only if you look at the back of the pack closely.

I analyzed 228 products (with known nutrition facts as of March 16, 2024) in the  Biscuits category of the India database of Open Food Facts  - the 'Wikipedia of food', Not surprisingly, a majority  of these products received a  Nova Group  grading of 4, indicating Ultra-Processed Food (UPF) status , the red alert for unhealthy choices!  The data, which has been obtained from Open Food Facts and subsequently cleaned up, is  available on GitHub in CSV format . To make it easier to slice and dice the data, view the above data on Github with the  Flat Viewer tool . The following screenshot from a view generated by that tool shows graphs of the distribution by weight of content of sugars and added sugar in 100 gms of the SKUs. Some cream biscuit varieties popular among kids not only contain a high quantity of sugar but also cholesterol and trans fats. Plastic is the most common form of packaging.  The weight of retail biscuit packs can vary signi...