Delhi Police bust expired food relabelling racket at Okhla packaging unit, arrest seven
A joint law enforcement team busted a major illegal food relabelling operation during a raid at Plot X-57 in the Okhla Industrial Area of Southeast Delhi on July 2. At around 1:30 PM, officials uncovered a packaging unit where expired branded food and beverages were allegedly being stamped with fake expiry dates and repackaged to be resold to consumers.
The raid was conducted by a 12-member joint team comprising the Delhi Police, officials from the office of the Sub-Divisional Magistrate (Badarpur), the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). The team originally arrived to investigate a tip-off about suspected child labour but uncovered the massive food safety fraud instead.
Police arrested seven individuals at the site, including the unit's owner, 70-year-old Darshan Singh Sachdeva, a resident of Greater Kailash. The other six arrested individuals include the unit’s manager, accountant, operator, warehouse keeper, and two supervisors. All seven have been booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita related to the sale of noxious food or drink, cheating, forgery, and criminal conspiracy.
According to investigators, the unit operated under the name Westend Corporation Private Limited and had been running at the Okhla premises for over three years. The suspects allegedly sourced near-expiry food products at steep discounts from 60 to 70 wholesale suppliers across Punjab, Haryana, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh.
Once the products arrived at the Okhla facility, workers allegedly used chemical thinner to erase the original manufacturing and expiry dates from the packaging. They then used handheld printing machines to stamp fresh dates, effectively extending the shelf life of the expired items by five to six months. If the original dates could not be completely removed, workers pasted similarly sized stickers with fake dates over them to conceal the original labels.
The seized items, valued at more than Rs 20 lakh, included popular brands such as Thums Up, Fanta, Bournvita, Horlicks, Maggi noodles, Paper Boat beverages, and various ghee products. Police also recovered counterfeit labels, stickers, forged nutrition-value labels, fake barcodes, and batch labels from the premises.
Authorities expressed concern that the relabelled, expired products had already entered mainstream supply chains. Investigators believe some of these potentially unsafe goods were supplied to warehouses linked to e-commerce platforms and may have reached unsuspecting consumers. Police have alerted the relevant e-commerce companies as the investigation continues.
