Five of Indore's best-known hotels got an unannounced visit from the Food Safety Administration on Saturday, and none of them came out clean.

Senior food safety officer Manish Swami told Free Press Journal that teams walked into Hotel Marriott, Hotel The Park, Radisson Blu, Radisson RED and Hotel Grand Sheraton without warning. They checked storage rooms, chopping boards, medical fitness files for kitchen staff, drinking water reports and whether stock was moving out on a first-in-first-out basis. Almost nowhere did the paperwork match the plate.

Hotel Marriott, run by Shri Balaji Landmark Hotel Pvt Ltd, had the longest list. Paneer, peanuts and sugar powder went off for testing while inspectors noted waterlogged, slippery kitchen floors with no anti-slip mats, old chopping boards, rusted trays and a leaking ceiling. The drinking water's pesticide report had gaps too, and the hotel hadn't uploaded its audit report to the FoSCoS portal. Some packaged items carried stickers that peeled off, which is exactly the kind of label officials look for.

At The Park, one of two in-house restaurants didn't have its FSSAI licence on display. Inspectors flagged a rusted kitchen platform, pots that weren't properly scrubbed, doors missing auto-closers and no visible temperature reading for the milk storage unit. Purchase bills and staff medical records were incomplete as well.

The two Radisson properties turned up smaller but similar problems. At Radisson Blu in Vijay Nagar, imported items lacked full importer details, and packets of kulcha bread and shahi jeera had labelling errors. Storage wasn't organised well enough for proper stock rotation, and medical fitness records weren't in the required format. Radisson RED, over in Scheme No. 54, had matching issues with labelling and stock rotation, plus missing medical certificates. Curd, cashew pieces and peanuts were sampled there.

Grand Sheraton's case had one dramatic moment. Sunflower seeds pulled from storage were in bad enough shape that officials destroyed them on the spot, not bothering to wait for a lab result. Paneer and raisins were also sampled. The hotel had no pesticide testing report for its water supply, and management was told, on record, to switch to non-porous chopping boards and install anti-slip flooring. More stickers that came off packaging turned up here too, this time on raw material sourced from local vendors.

The Food Safety Administration says notices are going out to every property where violations were logged, covering hygiene, storage, labelling and medical documentation. Swami's line to reporters was blunt: no laxity around food quality or hygiene gets tolerated.

What happens next depends on how these five hotels respond to the notices, and whether the lab results on paneer, curd, cashew and peanut samples come back clean. Officials have made clear this isn't a one-off sweep. More surprise visits are expected across the city in the weeks ahead.