Ready-to-Eat Extruded Snacks They all failed the fat test

Extruded snacks may sound like too heavy a terminology for your regular Kurkure, Fun Stix, and so on, but it’s just a way to demarcate a category of snacks made by a different process – in this case, extrusion cooking. While this process offers scope for developing relatively healthy variants (with alternative flours and grains) and inventive shapes, standards for this category of snacks are yet to be established in India’s food safety regulations. The five brands we have tested are all proprietary foods, which means that there are no standards for these in the food regulations. Yet, there must be some benchmarks to abide by. For instance, a major safety criterion for readyto-eat extruded snacks is total bacterial count. As you will find in the report, not all the brands fulfil this safety aspect.

The Food Safety and Standards Regulations provide no standard for this product category, though the Indian Standards IS 12566:1989 under ‘ready-to-eat extruded snacks’ specification prescribes limits for various aspects such as fat content and bacterial count. These requirements are not mandatory for manufacturers and it may be noted that no ISI mark was found on the products we tested. As a matter of fact, all of the tested products exceeded the limit for fat content.