Three days, four cities, one shopping list —
what 2026's shelf actually looks like.

The setup

In early April, we finalised a list of 18 commonly purchased supplement SKUs and briefed four buyers — one per city — to purchase each item from a brick-and-mortar retail outlet. Not Amazon. Not quick-commerce. Physical shelf, physical transaction, photograph of receipt and label required within 24 hours of purchase.

The 18 SKUs spanned six categories: creatine monohydrate, whey protein concentrate, whey protein isolate, multivitamins, omega-3 fish oil, and vitamin D3. We deliberately picked categories where we have existing lab data from our scoring process, so we'd have a baseline to compare shelf-found products against tested formulations. Brands were not pre-specified — buyers were instructed to purchase whichever brand was most prominently displayed or available at the outlet of their choice, replicating how most consumers actually shop.

The cities — Mumbai (Andheri West), Bengaluru (Koramangala), Delhi (Lajpat Nagar), Pune (Aundh) — were chosen to capture a mix of outlet types: the Koramangala buyer found a dedicated sports nutrition store; the Lajpat Nagar buyer went to a pharmacy with a supplement section; the other two visited general health retail chains. Outlet type, as it turned out, mattered more than city.

The creatine anomaly: ₹820 for the same jar

Creatine monohydrate is arguably the most-studied ergogenic compound in sports nutrition, with meta-analyses confirming effect sizes on anaerobic performance, lean mass, and cognitive function under fatigue. ¹ It is also, chemically, a commodity. Micronised creatine monohydrate ≥99.9% purity is available from multiple accredited manufacturers, and the synthesis pathway is well-established. The ingredient cost per serving is roughly ₹8–₹14 depending on batch size and supplier.

So when our four buyers came back with creatine products ranging from ₹649 to ₹1,469 for a nominally identical 500 g tub, the spread demanded an explanation. The ₹820 difference is not primarily explained by brand premium or patented form. The dominant variables were:

The Mumbai unit warrants the most scrutiny. The product was labelled as Optimum Nutrition (ON) Micronised Creatine — a product that, when imported through legitimate channels and re-labelled for the Indian market, should carry a visible FSSAI import licence number. This unit did not. The outer packaging appeared to be a US-format label with no Indian importer details, no FSSAI number, and a best-before date printed in a format inconsistent with Indian market goods. ²

The Pune unit — HK Vitals at ₹699 — is technically the most expensive by gram if you normalise to per-100g cost (₹279/100g vs. ₹144/100g for AS-IT-IS). The buyer reached for it because it was the most prominently shelf-faced product. This is a design problem, not a product problem: the unit's 250 g net weight is printed in 8pt type on the side panel.

City-by-city: what the outlet type determines

The single most predictive variable for product quality — meaning FSSAI compliance, label legibility, and product authenticity — was not the city. It was the outlet type. The dedicated sports nutrition store in Koramangala outperformed all other formats on every metric we tracked. The pharmacy supplement shelf in Lajpat Nagar was the worst.

Grey market and look-alike risk

India's supplement import regulations require that any food product manufactured abroad and sold in India must be imported by a licensed FSSAI importer and carry the importer's name, address, and FSSAI licence number on the label. ² Products that arrive through informal channels — grey market imports, parallel imports from third countries, or bulk decanting and local repacking — do not meet this requirement.

We found three products across the four cities that showed characteristics consistent with grey market origin:

• The ON creatine in Mumbai (described above). No Indian importer details, US-format label, best-before date format inconsistent with Indian goods.
• A whey protein isolate from a US brand in Mumbai — box label was in English only, with no Hindi ingredient list. FSSAI regulation 2.2.1 requires ingredient lists in English or Hindi; international products without a re-label typically lack the Hindi. ⁵
• One unmarked white jar of "Creatine Monohydrate" in the Lajpat Nagar pharmacy, sold loose in what appeared to be a generic re-packed format. No brand name, no FSSAI number, no batch number. Price: ₹480 for what was labelled as 500 g. We did not purchase it. We photographed it and reported it to the pharmacy manager, who was unaware of the regulatory issue.

Label math: what the bottle tells you, and what it hides

Across 24 products collected (some cities had multiple options; we collected the buyer's first choice plus one alternative where available), we tracked six label variables: net weight in prominent position, serving size, servings per container, cost per serving, active ingredient per serving, and third-party certification logo (if any). Here is what we found:

The zero-out-of-24 on cost-per-gram-of-active is the most telling number. This is the single most important consumer metric in a commodity category — if two creatine products both contain 5g creatine monohydrate per serving, the only meaningful differentiator is purity and price. But purity requires a COA (absent in 22 of 24 products), and price-per-gram is never stated. The consumer is structurally prevented from making an optimised decision at point of purchase.

The ALA omega-3 problem deserves its own paragraph

The Pune omega-3 product — labelled prominently with an omega-3 claim and imagery of fish — was a flaxseed oil capsule. ALA (alpha-linolenic acid) is indeed an omega-3 fatty acid. But the conversion of ALA to EPA in humans is approximately 5–10%, and conversion to DHA is less than 0.5%. ⁴ The clinical evidence base for omega-3 supplementation — including the ASCEND and VITAL trials for cardiovascular endpoints — is built on EPA and DHA, not ALA. ⁷ A flaxseed oil product provides neither at any clinically relevant concentration per standard serving size. This is not a labelling violation under current FSSAI rules. It is, however, a meaningful deception.

What this means for buyers in 2026

The Indian supplement retail shelf in 2026 is not a uniformly dangerous place. The majority of products we collected were FSSAI-compliant, from established domestic manufacturers, and contained what they claimed to contain. MuscleBlaze, AS-IT-IS, Wellbeing Nutrition, and several smaller domestic brands have invested in compliance infrastructure in ways that were not evident even three years ago.

But the tail risks are real, and they are concentrated in specific situations:

• Imported products in non-specialist outlets. If you're buying an international brand from a pharmacy supplement shelf or a general retail store, the probability of grey-market or non-compliant labelling is meaningfully higher than if you're buying the same product from a specialist retailer or directly from the brand's own website or Amazon.in storefront.
• Generic-label or loose-packed products. The unmarked white jar in Lajpat Nagar is not a Delhi anomaly. Our team has found similar products in Hyderabad (Abids), Chennai (T. Nagar), and Ahmedabad (Maninagar) in previous surveys. The format almost certainly exists in every major Indian city.
• Omega-3 products that don't specify EPA and DHA. This is effectively a category-wide issue. Without regulatory mandates requiring specific fatty acid disclosures, the shelf will continue to offer products that use omega-3 imagery to sell flaxseed oil.
• Multivitamin proprietary blends. Two of our collected multivitamins did not disclose the amount of individual vitamins and minerals — only a total "vitamin-mineral complex" weight. This is not currently prohibited under FSSAI food labelling regulations, but it makes evidence-based dose evaluation impossible.

The practical implication is neither to avoid supplements nor to buy only the most expensive option. It is to treat the label as a starting point rather than a conclusion. FSSAI number present, serving size in grams, active ingredient per serving clearly stated — these are necessary conditions, not sufficient ones. For the categories where purity matters most (creatine, protein, pre-workouts with stimulants), a publicly available COA from an NABL-accredited lab remains the only defensible quality signal at point of purchase.

We'll continue these surveys quarterly. The next one adds Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, expands the SKU list to 24, and includes a price-tracking component to monitor whether the patterns we found are stable or shifting. If you've found something unexpected on a shelf near you — a label issue, a grey-market product, a pricing anomaly — the field notes form at the bottom of this page is open.

References

1. [1]
   Lanhers et al. (2017). Creatine supplementation and lower limb strength performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis. European Journal of Sport Science. doi:10.1080/17461391.2016.1194657
2. [2]
   FSSAI Food Safety and Standards (Import) Regulations, 2017. Regulation 4 — Conditions for Import. Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. fssai.gov.in
3. [3]
   Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations, 2020. Regulation 3(1)(f) — Mandatory declaration of date of manufacture and best before date. FSSAI. fssai.gov.in
4. [4]
   Burdge & Calder (2005). Conversion of alpha-linolenic acid to longer-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids in human adults. Reproduction Nutrition Development, 45(5), 581–597. doi:10.1051/rnd:2005047
5. [5]
   Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations, 2020. Regulation 2.2.1 — Language of label. FSSAI. Products imported and re-labelled for Indian market must include English or Hindi ingredient declarations. fssai.gov.in
6. [6]
   Mathews et al. (2021). Adulteration and substitution in sports nutrition supplements: A review of global surveillance data 2010–2020. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 18(1). doi:10.1186/s12970-021-00441-7
7. [7]
   ASCEND Study Collaborative Group (2018). Effects of aspirin and omega-3 fatty acids on cardiovascular outcomes in type 2 diabetes. New England Journal of Medicine. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa1804988

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