April 16, 2025 — Dairy Dimension Bureau
As cellular agriculture technologies accelerate the development of lab-grown dairy analogues, the International Dairy Federation (IDF) has reiterated its global stance: dairy terms must remain exclusive to products derived from milking animals.
In a newly released position paper, IDF affirms that the use of dairy terminology—such as “milk”, “cheese”, or “yoghurt”—must be strictly governed by the Codex General Standard for the Use of Dairy Terms (GSUDT, CXS 206-1999). The standard defines milk as a natural mammary secretion from milking animals, intended for consumption or processing, with no additives or extractions.
📘 Codex Compliance: Why It Matters
The Codex GSUDT is the internationally recognised benchmark for defining dairy and preventing the misuse of terms that imply dairy origin. IDF’s position holds that cellular agriculture products, though innovative, do not meet the Codex definition of milk or dairy and should be labelled accordingly.
These definitions are not just regulatory—they’re rooted in consumer trust, transparency, and trade fairness.
❗ Why Protecting Dairy Terms Is Critical
- ✅ Avoiding consumer confusion: Consumers must be able to clearly distinguish between traditional dairy products and lab-grown or plant-based alternatives.
- ✅ Ensuring fair trade: Products not derived from milk should not gain a commercial advantage by using dairy-associated labels.
- ✅ Standardising international practices: Global dairy exporters and regulators rely on harmonised labelling to protect product identity and enforce food safety norms.
🌐 Implications for India’s Dairy Industry
India, as the world’s largest milk-producing country, faces increasing penetration of plant-based and fermentation-derived dairy alternatives in urban retail shelves. The IDF’s reaffirmation of GSUDT supports India’s regulatory stance on dairy purity, especially as the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has taken similar steps in recent years to restrict non-dairy products’ use of dairy terms.
For Indian cooperatives and private dairies, this also safeguards traditional milk and ghee’s value in domestic and export markets, where mislabeling by novel food entrants can create competitive and reputational distortions.