Introduction and background

“Street foods have traditionally been an integral part of Indian society… They represent the rich local traditional cuisines,” notes a government release​. From the chaat stalls of Delhi to the idli vendors of Chennai, street food plays an integral role in India’s urban food environment. It provides convenient, low-cost meals to millions of people and serves as a primary source of income for a significant share of the country’s informal workforce—estimated at around 10 million street vendors and about INR 8000 crore (USD 960 million) daily. The affordability and accessibility of street food make it a daily reliance for working-class consumers, especially those in urban areas with limited time, income, or kitchen access.

Street vendors also have the potential to support nutrition security, particularly when fresh produce or traditional recipes are used. Seasonal offerings—such as sprouted moong salads, roasted peanuts, or fruit carts—can provide essential micronutrients. This potential is often undermined when vendors prioritise cost-cutting over quality, using substandard or adulterated ingredients.

The sector is also associated with environmental and climate-related challenges. The widespread use of single-use plastics, unsafe food packaging, and poor waste disposal practices contributes to urban pollution and environmental degradation.

Another challenge is that while the government has made significant strides in recognizing street food vendors the sector is still largely informal, under-regulated, and often disconnected from food business policy ecosystem. Until recently, most policy conversations for street food have centered around hygiene and food safety in the context of foodborne illness, an equally important challenge emerging is: the poor nutritional quality of most of India’s street food. Vendors often use substandard or adulterated ingredients, reused oils, and nutrient-poor recipes. These practices expose consumers to long-term health risks, including diet-related non-communicable diseases, and undermine efforts toward ensuring nutrition security in urban India.

The evolving challenge: from food safety to nutrition security

Nutrition security goes beyond ensuring food is safe from contamination—it requires that food is also nutrient-dense and dietarily adequate. While affordable and filling, many street foods lack the required nutrition. A large proportion of street foods fall into the high-fat, sugar, and salt (HFSS) category made with refined flour, reused cooking oils, and added sugars are calorie-dense but offer limited amounts of essential nutrients such as high-quality protein, dietary fibre, vitamins, and minerals.

This pattern of consumption contributes to the dual burden of malnutrition—with undernutrition persisting in the form of micronutrient deficiencies (“hidden hunger”), alongside a growing incidence of non-communicable diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension. These risks are particularly pronounced in urban areas where dietary diversity is constrained by affordability and access.

While food safety efforts have made headway in addressing hygiene and microbial contamination, the nutritional risks associated with low-quality ingredients and poor formulations remain inadequately addressed. The continued reliance on adulterated inputs, excessive frying, and nutritionally imbalanced preparations compromises the safety and the dietary value of meals widely consumed in India’s urban food environments. Addressing these issues is essential to making street food a reliable part of India’s nutrition security landscape.

Vendor realities: barriers to safer, nutritious street food

While the discussed issues underscore the persistent risks associated with street food, they also reflect the economic and operational realities faced by vendors. To sustain their livelihoods, many vendors prioritise low-cost preparation and mass appeal, often at the expense of food quality and nutrition.

Improving food safety and nutrition in this sector requires more than regulation—it demands a grounded understanding of vendors’ day-to-day constraints. Most operate with minimal infrastructure, limited access to clean water, refrigeration, or waste management, and little formal training in food safety or nutrition. Financial limitations often lead to the use of low-quality or adulterated ingredients, reused oils, plastic packaging, and unsafe storage practices. These challenges are further compounded by long working hours, exposure to heat stress, and growing climate-related vulnerabilities, all of which affect both vendor well-being and the consistency of food safety practices.

Government efforts and public initiatives

The Government of India has taken important steps to address both demand- and supply-side challenges in the informal food sector, with a particular focus on food safety. Through the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), several key initiatives over the past five years have aimed to formalise, regulate, and build the capacities of street vendors—with an emphasis on improving hygiene and quality standards and promoting safer food handling practices across urban settings.

1) Clean Street Food Hubs

FSSAI’s Clean Street Food Hub initiative aims to certify clusters of 50 or more vendors based on hygiene, sanitation, infrastructure, and food handling practices. The initiative is a collaboration of the Ministry of Health and, the Ministry of Housing and Urban affairs, underscoring the commitment of the government to recognize the value of safe street foods. Iconic street food markets in some cities such as Kankariya in Ahmedabad, Chappan Dukaan in Indore, Girgaon Chowpatty in Mumbai, etc. have already received this certification after undergoing structured improvements, including infrastructure upgrades, vendor training, and third-party audits. These hubs demonstrate that street food can be both affordable and safe, provided adequate support and oversight are in place.

2) Eat Right India and FoSTaC

The broader Eat Right India campaign promotes safe, healthy, and sustainable diets and includes street food vendors as a key constituency. Through the Food Safety Training and Certification (FoSTaC) programme, vendors are being trained in safe food handling, personal hygiene, and basic nutrition. FSSAI has worked with municipal corporations in many cities to make training and certification mandatory for vendor registration, using incentives such as visibility, branding, and inclusion in government-supported vendor lists.

3) Regulating oil use and promoting safe disposal

Recognizing the risks of reused cooking oil, FSSAI introduced the Repurpose Used Cooking Oil (RUCO) framework, which sets limits for total polar compounds (TPC) in frying oils and promotes the collection of used oil for biodiesel conversion. Total Polar Compounds are formed on repeated frying. The toxicity of these compounds is associated with several diseases such as hypertension, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, liver diseases. While initially targeted at larger food businesses, the initiative has encouraged public dialogue on safe oil use and has been piloted in some municipal vendor clusters through awareness drives and mobile testing labs.

4) Credit, registration, and infrastructure through convergence

Government assistance schemes and initiatives such as PM SVANidhi, the National Urban Livelihoods Mission, and local vending regulations under the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 provide a framework for vendor formalisation and support. Many states and cities now require vendors to obtain FSSAI registration and undergo basic training. Municipalities have also begun creating model food streets, improving sanitation, seating, and access to clean water.

The role of the private sector

While public initiatives have laid the foundation, there is a significant opportunity for the private sector—particularly food manufacturers, ingredient suppliers, and digital platforms—to fill existing gaps and co-create solutions.

1. Improving access to quality ingredients:

Private sector actors—particularly food manufacturers, distributors, and aggregators—can play a critical role in improving the quality of inputs used by street vendors. This includes:

• Stable, low-trans-fat oils packaged in smaller quantities for daily use
• Verified dairy products, such as milk and paneer, sourced from regulated suppliers
• Fortified ingredients, like iodised salt, iron-rich flours, or spice blends with added micronutrients

Bulk procurement models, vendor cooperatives, or branded supply chains targeting street food clusters could make these products more accessible. This could be tied to incentive schemes where vendors who use verified products are eligible for recognition or partnerships.

2. Vendor training and certification partnerships:

Food companies and CSR programmes have demonstrated that hygiene and food safety training can be scaled through private engagement. Examples include Nestlé India’s collaboration with NASVI and Swiggy’s onboarding of street vendors under the PM SVANidhi scheme. These efforts can be expanded to include nutrition modules, with simple guidance on using fresh ingredients, reducing oil reuse, adding vegetables, and reformulating popular items.

Private labs and startups can also provide low-cost food testing services, mobile diagnostics for oil degradation, and self-certification toolkits, enabling vendors to monitor their practices in real time.

3. Enhancing consumer trust and market linkages

Food delivery platforms, e-commerce apps, and local food discovery tools can support transparent vendor listings, hygiene scores, and traceability for consumers. Vendors meeting safety and nutrition criteria can be promoted through these platforms, creating market-based incentives for quality improvements.

Private players in food processing and logistics can partner with municipalities to develop shared kitchen infrastructure, cold chains, or clean cooking carts, helping bridge the infrastructure deficit that currently constrains street food safety.

Future direction and recommendations

To align India’s street food ecosystem more closely with public health and nutrition priorities, future interventions must move beyond hygiene compliance and explicitly address food quality, dietary adequacy, and vendor viability. This shift requires a balanced approach—one that protects consumer health while supporting vendors as key actors in the food system. The following areas offer actionable pathways to reframe street food safety through a nutrition-sensitive lens:

• Integrate nutrition into food safety standards: FSSAI and state food authorities can incorporate nutritional benchmarks—such as limits on reused oil, inclusion of fortified ingredients, or minimum vegetable content—within vendor certification frameworks. This will help shift attention from contamination control alone to overall food quality.
• Leverage PM SVANidhi and urban missions for food quality: Existing schemes supporting vendor credit, registration, and formalisation can be expanded to include nutrition training, input linkages, and quality assurance. This creates an integrated model where street vendors receive support not just to operate, but to improve the quality of their offerings.
• Invest in vendor-centric digital tools: Mobile applications and simple tech solutions can offer vendors access to training modules, hygiene checklists, safe recipe guides, and supplier directories in local languages. These tools can help vendors make informed choices without incurring additional costs or regulatory burdens.
• Protect vendors from external vulnerabilities: Interventions must account for heat stress, climate variability, and financial shocks that affect vendor livelihoods. Support measures—such as shaded carts, hydration points, health insurance linkages, and climate-resilient infrastructure—should be part of nutrition-sensitive urban planning.
• Create a healthy street food certification or label: A voluntary nutrition-positive vendor recognition scheme, tied to improved recipes, verified sourcing, and responsible cooking practices, can help vendors differentiate themselves and attract more health-conscious consumers.
• Raise consumer awareness and drive demand: Public campaigns can increase understanding of nutritional risks in commonly consumed street foods, while encouraging demand for safer and healthier alternatives. Consumer behaviour plays a powerful role in shaping vendor practices—greater awareness can accelerate the shift toward nutritious street food.

Conclusion

India’s efforts to improve street food safety through regulation, training, and infrastructure have laid critical groundwork. However, the focus must now expand to nutrition security, for these interventions to translate into long-term public health gains. Street food will remain a vital part of the urban food ecosystem, especially for low-income consumers. Ensuring that it contributes positively to diets—not just in taste and satiety, but also in nutritional value—requires aligning the interests of vendors, regulators, consumers, and private actors.

By working together to improve inputs, reformulate recipes, and create incentives for quality, stakeholders can transform India’s street food sector into a safe, nutritious, and trusted source of urban nourishment.

This blog was first published on the NUFFOODS Spectrum platform on 2nd June 2025.