Navratri fruit desserts and ice creams: starch, stabilisers and honest labels

Navratri demand reaches the freezer and the bakery bench before it reaches the home kitchen. A buyer will ask for a mango ripple, a fruit piece or a filling that their fasting customers can accept. The useful answer is a specification and a label, not a slogan.

Sharad Navratri 2026 is published as 11 to 19 October, with Vijayadashami on 20 October, in ET Online’s vrat food guide of 5 October 2026. That guide is also clear that fasting rules are not the same in every house.

Vrat-friendly is a customer question, not a regulated claim

ET Online says a commonly followed vrat avoids regular grains, pulses, onion, garlic and ordinary table salt. Flours it lists as commonly used are kuttu (buckwheat), singhara (water chestnut), rajgira (amaranth), sama rice flour and arrowroot. Wheat atta, maida and rice flour are described as generally avoided on a strict vrat. Vegetables, fruit and dairy rules also vary. The guide says a food accepted in one region may be refused in another, and that a family tradition should take precedence.

Nothing in that list is an FSSAI standard for desserts. “Vrat-friendly” is not a category in the ice-cream standard. If you print it, you are making a promise about someone else’s custom. Prefer a plain statement of what is in the food.

Ask the buyer, in writing:

• Which flours and starches their customers refuse
• Whether dairy is accepted (many vrat plates include milk, curd and ghee; some fasts do not)
• Whether sendha namak is required, and whether ordinary salt must be absent
• Whether onion, garlic or a particular spice is out

Put the answers on the specification. Declare the ingredients. Let the customer decide if that recipe fits their fast. Do not decide it for them with a badge.

What the ice-cream standard allows

The text of FSSAI’s standard for ice cream, kulfi, chocolate ice cream, softy ice cream, milk ice, milk lolly and dried ice cream mix is sub-regulation 2.1.14. The copy used here is the annexure FSSAI hosts at the ice cream and frozen dessert file. It should be read with the general standard for milk and milk products.

Ice cream, kulfi, chocolate ice cream or softy ice cream, in that standard, is a frozen milk product made by freezing a pasteurised mix prepared from milk or other products derived from milk, or both. Nutritive sweeteners and other permitted non-dairy ingredients may be added. Softy may be frozen soft. The rest is frozen hard.

Permitted ingredients named in the standard include:

• Sugar and other nutritive sweeteners, with jaggery, dextrose, fructose, liquid glucose, dried liquid glucose, high-maltose corn syrup and honey given as examples
• Potable water
• Starch, only in amounts functionally necessary under good manufacturing practice, taking account of stabilisers or thickeners in Appendix A of the regulations
• Other non-dairy ingredients: fruit and fruit products, eggs and egg products, coffee, cocoa, chocolate, confectionery, condiments, spices, ginger and nuts, and bakery products such as cake or cookies

For the standard ice cream, kulfi, chocolate ice cream or softy, the composition table in that text sets total solids at not less than 36.0 percent, milk fat at not less than 10.0 percent, and milk protein at not less than 3.5 percent. Medium-fat and low-fat rows are lower, and the type has to be indicated on the label. Protein, the note says, is 6.38 multiplied by total nitrogen. Where a coating or a layer of non-dairy ingredients is a separate part, only the ice-cream portion has to meet those numbers.

Fruit is already on the permitted list. A ripple, a variegate or a fruit piece does not need to be described as a health product to be a legitimate ingredient. The briefs for that work sit under ice cream, ripples and variegates, inclusions, fruit preparations and bakery.

Starch has to be declared

The same standard says every package of ice cream, kulfi, chocolate ice cream and softy ice cream containing starch shall carry a declaration on the label as specified in sub-regulation 2.7.1(2) of the Food Safety and Standards (Packaging and Labelling) Regulations, 2011.

In the compendium of those regulations (version IV, 30 December 2021), regulation 2.7.1(2) says a package of a food which is not pure because of an addition, admixture or deficiency shall carry an adhesive label in this form:

This (a) ………. contains an admixture/addition of not more than (b) …… per cent of (c) ……

The blanks are the name of the food, the quantity, and the name of the admixture. Where the context needs it, “contains an admixture of” is replaced by “contains an addition of” or “is deficient in.”

Clause 5 of that regulation says it does not apply to sweets, confectionery, biscuits, bakery products, processed fruits, aerated water, vegetables and flavouring agents. Ice cream is not in that exemption list. A bakery product is. If the same fruit filling goes into a biscuit or a pastry, do not assume the ice-cream starch sentence applies. Ask your advisor which standard, and which labelling regulation, covers that SKU. Labelling rules have been amended since 2011. This page is not the consolidated text, and it is not legal advice.

There is a second, quieter labelling point. The same compendium allows the class title “Starch” for starches other than chemically modified starches. That class title can be legal and still be useless to a fasting customer. “Starch” does not say wheat, maize, rice, arrowroot or singhara. For a Navratri brief, name the source on the specification. Ask your advisor whether the pack should name it as well, rather than stopping at the class title.

Choosing a starch when a buyer is fasting

Match the starch to the tradition the buyer described. Arrowroot is the thickener ET Online lists as commonly used on a vrat. Kuttu, singhara and rajgira are flours in the same list, not automatic substitutes for a stabiliser system in ice cream. Maida and wheat atta are on the “generally avoided” side of that guide. Cornflour is not given a yes or a no there. Do not invent a ban, and do not invent a permission. If the buyer’s customers refuse maize, leave maize out and say so on the spec.

Use only as much starch as the function needs. The ice-cream standard already ties that amount to good manufacturing practice and to whatever stabiliser or thickener Appendix A already allows in the product. Do not stack starch on top of a full stabiliser dose and call the extra “traditional.”

Appendix A is where the permitted stabilisers and thickeners, and their limits, are listed. This page does not copy those rows. Your regulatory advisor should pick the INS numbers the category allows, at the levels it allows, and the ingredient list should name them in the way the labelling rules require. A stabiliser the vrat customer has not heard of is not a reason to hide it.

Frozen dessert is a different name

Sub-regulation 2.1.15 in the same FSSAI file is the standard for frozen desserts or confections with added vegetable oil or fat, or vegetable protein, or both. The mix is pasteurised. It may also contain milk fat and other milk solids. Starch is again allowed only in amounts functionally necessary. Fruit and fruit products are again among the permitted non-dairy ingredients.

The name of that product, in the standard’s labelling clause, is “Frozen Dessert or Frozen Confection,” not ice cream. A further label sentence about the percentage of milk fat, edible vegetable oil, vegetable fat and vegetable protein is printed in the file and then marked as coming into force only after FSSAI’s decision on nomenclature, citing a direction of 1 January 2020. Do not lift that sentence onto a pack from this page. Confirm whether it applies to you.

If a buyer wants a dessert without milk fat, you are in the frozen-dessert standard or in some other category, not in 2.1.14. Say the name the standard uses. A fasting customer who avoids milk and a fasting customer who wants milk are both common. The specification should record which one this order is.

What to hand the buyer

A one-page spec is enough to start:

• Finished food: ice cream, frozen dessert, yoghurt cup, or bakery line, named as the standard requires
• Fruit preparation or fruit piece, with the fruit named
• Every starch, with its source
• Every stabiliser or thickener, as the advisor will declare it
• Salt, if any, and whether it is sendha namak or ordinary salt
• What was deliberately left out, because the buyer asked, written as an absence on the spec rather than as a slogan on the label

How to read a fruit preparation spec and labelling fruit preparations are the house notes on that paperwork. Fruit analogues explains a shaped piece. None of those pages, and not this one, tells a buyer that a dessert suits a fast.