Diwali Sweets: A Regional Mithai List and FSSAI's Purity Checks

Diwali Sweets: A Regional Mithai List and FSSAI's Purity Checks

Diwali sweets fall into three families, and the family decides how long a box lasts: milk sweets made from khoya or chhena, flour-and-ghee sweets such as boondi laddoo and gujiya, and dry sweets built on nuts, jaggery or sugar. FSSAI's own guidance puts kalakand at the same day, rasgulla and sandesh at 2 days in a fridge, peda and boondi laddoo at 4 days, kaju katli at 7 and besan laddoo or chikki at about 30.

Two home checks in FSSAI's DART book cover the riskiest parts of a mithai box: iodine for starch in khoya, and crush-and-burn for fake silver varq. One rule many buyers still quote no longer holds: since 7 November 2023, a best-before date on loose sweets is voluntary. Diwali 2027 falls on Friday 29 October.

What counts as a Diwali sweet, and why the base ingredient matters

A Diwali sweet, or mithai, is any sweet made to share across the five days from Dhanteras to Bhai Dooj, and it is best defined by its base: milk solids, a cereal or pulse flour, or nuts and sweetener. The base decides how fast it spoils and which adulterant is worth checking for.

FSSAI's Guidance Note No. 14/2020 on traditional milk products (24 February 2020) uses the same split: milk sweets such as peda, burfi and rasgulla; cereal, starch or grain sweets such as boondi laddoo, jalebi and soan papdi; and sweet snacks such as chikki and gajak. It says sweets with milk products last only 1 to 4 days and are the most prone to microbial growth. The note states that it "does not have any force of law", so read it as the regulator's advice, not a rule a shop must follow.

Diwali sweets list by region, with main ingredient and shelf life

The table compares five regional groups of Diwali mithai by main ingredient and keeping time. Shelf life comes from FSSAI's illustrative list where it names the sweet; anything marked EST is our own estimate from the closest listed sweet, not an FSSAI figure.

The more water and fresh milk in a sweet, the shorter its life. A Bengali box bought on Dhanteras, 27 October 2027, is past FSSAI's 2-day line by Lakshmi Puja on the 29th, while besan laddoo bought the same day is still inside its window at Bhai Dooj.

How long each kind of mithai keeps, by FSSAI's five classes

The guidance note sorts sweets into five shelf-life classes, counted from the date of manufacture rather than the day you bought the box. The clock starts at the halwai's stove, and a shop is no longer obliged to print that date.

• Same day, room temperature: kalakand and its butterscotch, rose and chocolate variants.
• 2 days, refrigerated: rasgulla, ras malai, rajbhog, cham cham, sandesh, malai roll, kheer mohan.
• 4 days: milk cake, Mathura peda, plain and coconut burfi, boondi laddoo, motichoor modak.
• 7 days: kaju katli, dry-fruit laddoo, ghewar, balushahi, chandrakala, besan burfi.
• About 30 days: atta laddoo, besan laddoo, chana burfi, Karachi halwa, sohan halwa, gajak, chikki.

How to check Diwali sweets for purity at home

FSSAI's DART book, "Detect Adulteration with Rapid Test" (41 pages, file dated January 2024) is the regulator's illustrated home-testing manual. Two of its tests apply to a mithai box, and the guidance note adds two checks that need no chemicals.

1. Starch in khoya, chhena or paneer: the iodine test

Test 3 on page 03 of the DART book covers khoya, chhena and paneer. Boil 2 to 3 ml of the sample with 5 ml of water, cool it, and add 2 to 3 drops of tincture of iodine; a blue colour means added starch. The book gives this test for the raw milk product, so it is most useful on khoya you buy to make peda or gujiya at home.

2. Aluminium in silver varq: crush, then burn

Test 10 on page 09 covers the silver leaf on kaju katli and barfi. Rub a scrap between two fingers: real silver crumbles to powder, while aluminium breaks into smaller shreds. Then roll a piece into a ball and burn it; pure silver burns away leaving glistening balls, and aluminium is reduced to grey ash.

3. Look, smell and texture against FSSAI's quality table

The guidance note's quality table describes 17 milk products by flavour, body and colour. Cow-milk khoya should be pale yellow with a tinge of brown, buffalo-milk khoya white with a slightly greasy surface, and peda, burfi and kalakand free of burnt particles. Rasgulla should be white, spongy and without a hard centre.

4. Read the tray before you buy

For loose sweets, the 2020 note asks the tray to say whether oil, ghee or vanaspati was used, and the shop to display its FSSAI licence or registration prominently. A shop that cannot name the fat or the making date has told you something anyway.

Silver varq and colour: the FSSAI limits behind the tests

FSSAI's gazette notification on silver leaf (chandi-ka-warq), dated 19 July 2016 and in force from 1 August 2017, sets the standard for food-grade leaf. It must be a sheet of uniform thickness without creases or folds, weigh up to 2.8 g per square metre, carry silver of at least 999/1000 fineness, and use no material of animal origin at any stage.

The swap is real. A review in the Indian Journal of Medical Research, V. Siruguri, "Journey from food toxins to food safety" (November 2018), lists "use of aluminium foil in place of silver foil on sweets" among important adulterants identified in India, alongside coal tar dyes in confectionery. If you would rather not test, ask for the same sweet without varq.

Colour is capped, not banned. Varghese and Ramamoorthy, "Status of food colorants in India" (13 March 2023) states that under FSSAI regulations synthetic colours must not exceed 100 ppm in the final food, and cites Indian studies that detected non-permitted dyes such as rhodamine B and metanil yellow.

There is no kitchen test for this: the guidance note's coal tar dye check needs dilute sulphuric or concentrated hydrochloric acid. A fluorescent orange jalebi, or a burfi that stains your fingers, is a reason to buy the plain version.

The best-before rule for loose sweets changed in November 2023

Directions FSSAI issued on 25 September 2020 made a best-before date mandatory on the containers and trays of loose sweets. FSSAI's letter of 7 November 2023 withdrew them "till further decision", because the labelling regulations they mirrored had been replaced by the Labelling and Display Regulations, 2020. Shops may still show the date, on a voluntary basis.

This post found no later order reinstating it when checked in October 2026. So ask when the batch was made and count forward using the five classes, rather than looking for a label that may legally be absent.

Keep the risk in proportion. FSSAI's festive-season pilot survey, run from 15 October to 7 November 2019, tested 1,041 milk-product samples from 11 districts of Delhi-NCR and found predominantly quality and hygiene problems rather than safety issues, more often in loose samples than packed ones.

Sending sweets to someone who is not at home this Diwali

Distance changes the list. Kalakand cannot travel and Bengali sweets have a 2-day window, so for family in another city the parcel that survives is the 30-day class: besan laddoo, chikki, gajak or Karachi halwa.

A greeting can sit alongside the box. SubhSandesh's interactive Diwali card that ends with a mithai box lets one person light a diya at their door, colour a rangoli with your initials and open a letter from a shagun liffafa, finishing on a Shubh Deepavali card where you set their favourite sweet; it takes about 5 minutes and opens in any browser with no app.

On our platform, 48.3% of shared pages are opened on a phone and the average page records 11.1 views. We have no Diwali data yet; our nearest festival analogue, Raksha Bandhan 2026 (n = 89), shows 49.4% of pages were built on the festival day itself, a head start a link can skip and a parcel of laddoos cannot.

When these checks are not enough, and where SubhSandesh does not help

The DART tests only screen. A clean iodine result shows no starch, not that the khoya is fresh or free of microbes, and FSSAI's guidance note carries no legal force. If a sweet tastes sour, smells off or made someone ill, stop eating it and report it through the Food Safety Connect channels listed in the 2020 note.

SubhSandesh cannot help with any of that. It is a greeting page for one person, not a sweets shop, a delivery service or a testing tool, and it carries no food. If someone far away would rather have a miss-you page that counts down to your next visit than a Diwali card, that one runs all year.

Sources

• FSSAI, Guidance Note No. 14/2020, traditional milk products, 24 February 2020.
• FSSAI, DART book, file dated January 2024.
• FSSAI, Silver leaf gazette notification, 19 July 2016.
• FSSAI, Best-before directions for loose sweets withdrawn, 7 November 2023.
• Siruguri V., Journey from food toxins to food safety, Indian Journal of Medical Research, November 2018.
• Varghese R., Ramamoorthy S., Status of food colorants in India, Journal of Consumer Protection and Food Safety, 13 March 2023.