Yes, you can sell homemade food online in India, and the paperwork is smaller than most people expect: one FSSAI registration that costs ₹100 a year. If your pickles, sweets or snacks already sell in the colony, going online is mostly about packaging and courier choices, not licences.
Do you need FSSAI?
Yes. Anyone selling food in India needs to be on the FSSAI register, even a home kitchen. For small sellers this means the Basic Registration, not the full licence, and it covers you until your sales cross ₹1.5 crore a year, a number most home kitchens will never need to think about.
That limit went up in April 2026, from ₹12 lakh earlier. Plenty of articles online still quote the old number, so do not let them confuse you.
Selling without registration is an offence and can bring a fine, but there is a more practical reason to register: buyers trust a jar with an FSSAI number on it, and platforms and couriers ask for one.
Getting registered
Registration happens on foscos.fssai.gov.in, the government’s FoSCoS portal. You fill Form A, upload a photo and an ID, and declare what you make. There is no inspection for Basic Registration; it works on self-declaration. The fee is ₹100 for a year, you can pay for up to five years at once, and approval usually comes within a week or so.
The warning from our GST post applies here too. If someone quotes ₹1,500 to “get your food licence”, they are charging ₹1,400 for filling a form. Paying a professional to handle it is a fair choice; just know what the real cost is.
Once you have the number, print it on your labels.
Packaging that survives the courier
Most complaints about home food sold online are not about taste. They are about jars that leaked and laddus that arrived as one big laddu.
For pickles and anything with oil, use PET jars with an inner seal rather than glass. Tape the lid, bag the jar, then bubble wrap. For sweets and snacks, use boxes with tight inner packing so nothing moves. Do a drop test from table height before you ship your first order; the courier will do worse.
Label every pack with the name, the ingredients, the date you made it, how long it keeps, and your FSSAI number.
Pricing your food
Count everything before you set a price. Say a 500g jar of mango pickle:
- ingredients: ₹120
- jar, label and packing: ₹30
- courier: ₹60
That jar costs you ₹210 before you count the afternoon you spent making it. Price it at ₹250 and you are working for free. Somewhere around ₹320 to ₹350 pays for your time and leaves room for the occasional damaged parcel.
If that feels high, remember what you are selling. Nobody buys a homemade pickle because it is cheap. They buy it because it tastes like someone’s home, whether that home makes avakaya, aam ka achar or methia keri.
Taking orders and shipping
Be straight about shelf life and delivery time. A pickle survives a week in transit; rasgullas and gulab jamuns do not. Sell what travels well, say clearly how long it keeps, and tell the buyer how many days shipping takes before they order, not after.
For couriers, surface shipping is cheaper and works for jars and dry snacks. Softer things should go by air or stay local. Some sellers keep the rule simple: perishables only within their own city, everything else all over India.
Selling on Sagazo
Sagazo takes no commission and has no listing fee, so a ₹350 jar earns you ₹350. How that works is in zero commission selling on Sagazo.
One more thing: GST. Selling within your own state, most home food sellers need no GST registration at all. Shipping to other states does need it. The plain-words version is in our GST post.
When you are ready, tell us about your kitchen on the become a seller page and we will set you up.
Food rules change, and some states add their own requirements. Check fssai.gov.in for your case.