India's legal standard in plain words — the numbers a batch must meet, what the label must carry, and how much of the rest of the label means nothing at all.
Under the Food Safety and Standards Regulations, ghee is the pure clarified fat obtained solely from milk, curd or butter, with no added colouring matter and no preservative.
That sentence does more work than it looks. Anything containing vegetable fat is not ghee in Indian law, however the front of the pack is worded. This is why the adulteration test below is not a nice-to-have but a legal requirement.
| Parameter | Requirement | What it is actually telling you |
|---|---|---|
| Moisture | Not more than 0.5% | Ghee is fat with the water driven off. Water is what lets microbes grow, so this cap is the reason ghee keeps for months at room temperature without preservatives. |
| Free fatty acids | Not more than 3.0% (as oleic acid) | A freshness measure. Fat breaking down releases free fatty acids, so old stock, poor storage or overheating in production all push this up. A result close to 3.0% is legal but not impressive. |
| Baudouin test | Negative — required | The test for vanaspati. It works by detecting sesame oil, which Indian law requires vanaspati to contain precisely so this test can catch it. A positive result means the product cannot legally be sold as ghee. |
| Butyro-refractometer reading at 40°C | About 40.0 to 43.0 | How the fat bends light, which tracks its fatty-acid composition. Most vegetable oils fall well outside this window, so a reading outside it says the fat profile is wrong — without saying what was added. |
| Reichert-Meissl value | Commonly 28 minimum, but it varies | Measures volatile water-soluble fatty acids, mainly butyric acid. Milk fat is unusually rich in these and vegetable oils have almost none, which makes this one of the more telling single numbers. The legal minimum is lower in certain southern states and in particular months, because the fatty-acid profile of milk changes with what the cattle eat. |
| Polenske value | Reported alongside Reichert-Meissl | A companion measure covering a different group of volatile fatty acids. Read together, the two are harder to fake than either alone — which is why a report showing one and not the other is worth a question. |
Standards as applied in September 2026. The Reichert-Meissl minimum genuinely varies by state and season — if you are checking a report against a limit, check which limit applies to where and when it was made.
Separate from the chemistry, packaged food in India has to tell you certain things. On a jar of ghee, that means:
A batch number matters more than it looks: without one, a lab report cannot be tied to the jar in your hand. That point is made properly in reading a ghee lab report.
Meeting the FSSAI standard is a floor, not a distinction. It establishes that a product is genuine, unadulterated milk fat. It is a real assurance and worth having — and every compliant ghee in India clears it, which means it separates nothing.
Here is what the standard does not establish, and what a lab report therefore cannot tell you:
Those are sourcing questions, and no chemical panel answers them. A brand that answers "is it pure?" with a certificate and answers "where is it from?" with adjectives has told you one thing and dodged the other.
| Word on the jar | What it is worth |
|---|---|
| Bilona | Completely unregulated. No legal definition, no test that distinguishes curd-churned ghee from cream-separated ghee on a certificate. It is a claim about process, and the only thing behind it is whether the seller is telling the truth. |
| A2 | Describes the beta-casein variant in the milk, which comes from the breed of cow. There is no routine test on a finished ghee certificate that confirms it, and ghee has very little casein in it to begin with. It is a provenance claim, verifiable only up the supply chain. |
| Pure / 100% pure | Means only that the product meets the legal definition of ghee. It is not a grade, not a distinction, and every compliant ghee on the shelf can print it. |
| Desi / traditional / handmade / village | No legal meaning whatsoever in this context. |
| Organic | This one IS regulated — under the Jaivik Bharat mark and NPOP/PGS certification. If a jar says organic without a certification mark and number, that is a different matter from the words above. |
| Grass-fed | No Indian legal standard. In practice it describes a feeding regime the buyer cannot verify from the jar. |
We use several of these words ourselves, because they are the words the category runs on and refusing to use them would just make us hard to find. But they are claims we are making, not facts a regulator has checked, and you should treat ours the same way you treat anyone else's — which is to ask what is behind them.
That third one catches more than you would expect. A licence belonging to a different entity from the brand on the label is not automatically wrong — contract packing is legal and common — but it is worth knowing about a product sold as somebody's own.
Ours is 11525079000402, and we would rather you checked it than took our word for it.
Desi By Nature does not make ghee. We source it from Gir cow dairies that use the bilona method, have every batch independently tested by a NABL-accredited laboratory, and sell it under our name only when it passes. The FSSAI standard is the floor we require our suppliers to clear; the lab report is how we check they did.
What you should take from this page is not that we are certified. It is that certification is the easy part, and the questions worth asking a brand start after it.
Under the Food Safety and Standards Regulations, ghee is the pure clarified fat obtained solely from milk, curd or butter, with no added colouring matter and no preservative. Anything with vegetable fat in it is not ghee in law, whatever the front of the pack says.
Not more than 0.5 per cent. The practical consequence is that essentially everything else in a compliant jar is milk fat.
It is the standard test for vanaspati — hydrogenated vegetable fat — in ghee, and a negative result is legally required. It works because Indian law requires vanaspati to contain sesame oil specifically so that this test can detect it. It is the single most useful line on a ghee lab report.
It means it is genuine milk fat and not adulterated, which is a real assurance and worth having. It says nothing about the breed of cow, whether curd was churned or cream was boiled, how the cattle were fed, or how it tastes. Those are sourcing questions and no chemical panel answers them.
No. There is no legal definition and no test that can confirm it from a finished jar. Nor are "desi", "traditional", "handmade" or "pure" — the last of these means only that the product is legally ghee. "Organic" is the exception: that one is regulated, and should carry a certification mark and number.
Every packaged food sold in India must carry an FSSAI licence number on the label, and those numbers are public. You can look one up at foscos.fssai.gov.in and see the licence holder, its status and what it is licensed to do. It takes about a minute and very few people ever do it.