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Food industry suffers from visibility gap
This article is authored by Shubham Tibrewal, business head - food service, Pakka Limited.
The Quick Service Restaurant you ate at last weekend might have saved you from millions of microplastics, but you certainly did not notice.
That is not a figure of speech but a widespread ignorance that diners usually have. When hot, oily or microwaved food meets plastic or foam, it sheds an astonishing quantity of tiny plastic particles into the meal itself. In laboratory tests, common plastic packaging released in the order of one to two million sub-microns and microplastic particles for every millilitre of hot liquid it held, with foam containers among the worst.
Microwaving is worse still: a 2023 study found that a single square centimetre of plastic container could release more than four million microplastic particles in three minutes. If your meal arrived instead on a plate made from sugarcane fibre, much of that exposure simply did not happen.
Microplastics in food is a serious problem, but an equally serious problem is that people’s efforts at reducing the exposure to microplastics is largely unnoticed. This is the quiet problem at the centre of how we talk about sustainability. The choices that matter most are made upstream — in procurement, in sourcing, in materials — far from the moment a customer experiences the product. By the time the meal reaches the table, the decision is invisible. I have come to think of this as the visibility gap, and closing it is one of the more useful things Indian business can work on now.
The scale is worrisome. India generates about 3.9 million tonnes of plastic waste a year, according to the Central Pollution Control Board's 2022–23 report, and a large share of it flows through food and food service. So the humble question of what material a meal is served in is not a small one.
This visibility gap has a cost, and it runs in two directions. Companies that do the real, expensive, unglamorous work of changing what a product is made of get little credit for it, because customers cannot see what they cannot see. At the same time, customers lose the chance to reward good choices, because nothing at the point of use tells them a good choice was made.
The result is an odd inversion. A brand that quietly overhauls its supply chain can go unnoticed, while a brand that prints a leaf on its packaging and does little of substance can capture attention. In a 2021 screening of online green claims, the European Commission found that 42% were exaggerated, false or deceptive. Volume of claim, too often, beats substance of action.
Therefore, the answer to bridging the visibility gap is not more marketing. The temptation, once you see the visibility gap, is to fill it with slogans, and we have all seen where that leads. Regulators have seen it too. Since February 2024, the Advertising Standards Council of India has suggested that words like "eco-friendly" and "sustainable" be backed by robust data and credible certification, and has ruled that such absolute claims cannot be rescued by a disclaimer or a link to a website. In plain terms, you can no longer say it unless you have done it. The work has to come first.
What I am arguing for is nuanced: when a business has genuinely made a better choice, it has a responsibility to make that choice legible to the people it serves.
There is a reason this matters more today than it did five years ago, as today the customer has changed. In a 2024 study, more than half of Indian consumers surveyed said they were willing to pay more for sustainable products, up from around a third two years earlier. People increasingly ask how their food is sourced, how it is packed, and what it might be doing to their health. When a business meets that curiosity with something honest and visible, it earns a trust no advertisement can buy.
We have spent a long time on the upstream half of this problem, making food-service products from sugarcane fibre that carry hot, oily food and then return to the earth within months. But the upstream work only pays off fully when the person at the table understands it. In our own small way we have begun testing the downstream half with Restaurants Who Care Club, helping restaurants that already use such products show their customers what their food is served on. What we have learned is remarkable and encouraging in equal measure. When you make the good choice visible, people notice and care more.
None of this requires a grand campaign. It requires a discipline: do the real work first, then take responsibility for making it seen. The plate you did not notice at your last meal is a small thing. Multiply it across every meal served in this country, and letting people see the choice behind it becomes one of the more honest things we can do.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Shubham Tibrewal, business head - food service, Pakka Limited.
