Department of Criminology & Forensic Science, Dr. H. S. Gour University, Sagar-470 003, Madhya Pradesh, India E-mail : dev1bose@rediffmail.com Fax : 91-7582-222163 Amity Institute of Forensic Sciences, Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India Department of Chemistry, Dr. H. S. Gour University, Sagar-470 003, Madhya Pradesh, India Regional Forensic Science Laboratory, Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, India Manuscript received online 18 August 2013, revised 19 December 2013, accepted 02 January 2014 A simple and fast spectrophotometric method was developed for qualitative and quantitative detection of three banned colourants viz. metanil yellow, malachite green and methyl orange in raw foodstuffs. All these colours are hazardous dyes and are commonly used as adulterants in turmeric powder, aniseed, saffron and other food products resembling yellow, green and orange colour. In the present work, metanil yellow, malachite green and methyl orange were quantified in various raw food samples using a double beam spectrophotometer, which does not require prior analyte separation. Linearities was found to be (r > 0.995–0.998) for these colourants, intra-day and inter-day precision (RSD, %) was found less than 1.00, limit of detection and limit of quantification was also calculated for method validation. The simplicity of developed validated method proved to be easy and fast for the detection of metanil yellow, malachite green and methyl orange in raw food samples.