There’s a version of this story that most people outside the food industry never think about. Before a product reaches a supermarket shelf, before the packaging is printed, before the box is sealed, someone has to make sure every single claim, nutrient value, ingredient declaration, and regulatory statement on that label is correct. Not approximately correct. Precisely, legally, completely correct.
For decades, that someone was a team of people working across spreadsheets, email chains, and printed regulatory manuals, coordinating between R&D, quality control, nutrition science, and regulatory affairs, often for weeks at a time, for a single product. And then the regulation would change, or the formulation would be tweaked, or the company would decide to enter a new market, and the entire process would start over.
Dr. Rashida Vapiwala spent years watching this unfold. As a food regulation and nutrition expert working closely with food businesses and India’s regulatory bodies, she saw the same compliance gaps surface repeatedly, not because companies were careless, but because the process itself was broken. Manual, fragmented, and almost impossibly complex to scale.
In 2018, she decided to fix it.
The Hidden Complexity of a Food Label
LabelBlind® Solutions was founded on an insight that sounds simple but carries enormous implications: food labelling is not a one-time task. It is a living, constantly evolving compliance requirement, driven by regulatory changes, shifts in consumer behaviour, reformulations, new raw material suppliers, and the ever-expanding ambition of Indian food companies to reach global markets.
Every time a product changes, even slightly, the label must be reviewed and often regenerated. Every market a company enters brings its own regulatory framework, language requirements, and compliance standards. A food brand exporting to the GCC, the US, the EU, and Australia simultaneously isn’t dealing with one labelling requirement. It’s dealing with four entirely different regulatory universes, each with their own rules about what must be declared, how nutrients must be calculated, what claims are permitted, and how information must be presented.
The traditional approach to managing this, manual coordination across multiple internal teams, consultancy-led reviews, static templates, simply couldn’t keep pace. The cost was measured not just in money but in time-to-market, regulatory risk, and the constant possibility of human error slipping through.
Building the Solution
LabelBlind’s flagship product, FoLSol®, automates the core of this process. The platform digitises the entire food labelling lifecycle, from nutrition analysis through to global language-ready files and print-ready labels, and does it in under three minutes for compliant output that would previously have taken days or weeks.
Version 2.0 of the platform goes further, incorporating AI-powered label validation, Front of Pack Labelling regulation compliance, and product compliance checks on ingredient parameters. The platform’s proprietary ingredient database and modular architecture mean it can be configured to the specific regulatory requirements of different markets, currently covering India, the GCC, the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia-New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, totalling 22 countries.
For Indian food companies with export ambitions, this is significant. What once required weeks of back-and-forth with regulatory consultants in each target market can now be generated in minutes, with confidence in compliance readiness built into the output.
The platform has earned recognition from institutions that don’t extend credibility lightly. FSSAI, India’s apex food safety regulator, and NITI Aayog have both acknowledged LabelBlind’s work, a validation that Rashida considers among her most meaningful milestones.
“In regulated industries, trust and credibility matter more than speed,” she reflects. “Technology alone is not enough, you need deep domain understanding and accuracy.”
Earning the Trust of the Industry
Today, LabelBlind works with 40+ active clients including Tata Starbucks, Everest Spices, Amul, Tim Hortons India, and ITC Hotels, household names that operate at scale, export to multiple markets, and cannot afford to get compliance wrong.
For exporters in particular, the impact has been concrete and measurable. Generating compliant labels for multiple international markets that previously took weeks now happens in minutes. The reduction in regulatory risk and the acceleration in time-to-market aren’t marginal improvements, they represent a fundamental shift in how food companies approach global expansion.
The business runs on an annual subscription model, priced by data usage and tailored to SKU portfolio size, making it accessible to SMEs while remaining enterprise-ready for large FMCG players. A $500,000 seed round from high-net-worth investors including Vinay Mittal and Gaurav Chaudhary has supported the platform’s development and expansion.
The Bigger Vision
Rashida’s long-term ambition reaches well beyond food labels. She is building toward what she describes as the world’s first Global Food Regulatory Cloud, a digital backbone for compliance that evolves in real time alongside the regulatory landscape.
The roadmap includes AI-based claims validation and risk scoring, real-time regulatory updates across markets, multilingual label generation, and expansion beyond food into nutraceuticals and cosmetics compliance. The platform that began by automating a manual process is evolving into an intelligence layer that helps companies navigate an increasingly complex global regulatory environment proactively, not reactively.
It’s a vision grounded in a clear-eyed understanding of where the industry is heading. Regulatory frameworks are tightening globally. Consumer scrutiny of label claims is intensifying. The cost of non-compliance, in recalls, penalties, and reputational damage, is rising. The companies that will scale confidently across borders are those with compliance infrastructure that can keep pace.
LabelBlind is building that infrastructure.
“If you are building in a regulated industry, invest deeply in domain expertise,” Rashida advises fellow entrepreneurs. “Technology amplifies impact, but trust sustains growth. Solve real problems patiently, build credibility early, and let accuracy guide scale.”
It’s advice that reads like a summary of the LabelBlind story itself, a company that didn’t rush to market with a half-built product, but took the time to build something that food companies, regulators, and global markets could genuinely rely on.
One compliant label at a time.
