Evening Snacks Dominate Indian Bakery Market

The Indian bakery market is a combination of western baked goods and traditional items, but many Indians are also on gluten-free or vegan diets, Nandini Roy Choudhury, senior research consultant working with Future Market Insights (FMI), a global market research and consulting firm, writes for WorldBakers.com.

Biscuits are the largest consumer product segment in India, worth USD4.9bn. Other popular items among consumers would be the savory foods like rusks, kharis (puffs), and crackers. Sweet bakery products like cakes, cookies, and muffins are available in cake shops, retail stores, and cafés. Pastries, doughnuts, sliced breads, and burger buns also sell well in the urban areas. Slider buns have a sizable market in India, followed by sweet buns, nankhatais, and cream rolls. Traditional savory foods like litti (popular in Bihar, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh), baati (popular in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh) and baked-pithas (popular in Eastern and North-Eastern states of India) are sold at food outlets and under local brands.

Indians generally tend to prefer sweet, savory, and spicy flavors and even blends like sweet and spicy, sweet and salty, etc. Most of the bakery products are consumed as evening snacks. Sweet foods like biscuits, sweet buns, cream rolls as well as savory foods like crackers, puffs, and rusks are snacked along with milk and tea. Indian urbanites often buy cakes to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and other occasions, which is now a trend that is gradually replacing traditional Indian sweets. Millennials frequently visit cafés that serve sweet bakery foods like doughnuts, cookies, and pastry delicacies. Consumers’ favorite spicy snacks like vada-pav and Kacchi dabeli are typically served with slider buns (pav) as a base.

Biscuits, rusks, and puffs are the topmost traditional Indian bakery items. Rising concerns for health drove the bakery market to come up with innovative products like what bread, multi-grain/all-grain bread, semolina rusk, multi-grain rusk, herb-flavored rusk, brown khari, diet wheat khari, oat biscuits, ragi biscuits, millet biscuits, digestive biscuits, whole wheat nankhatais, etc. An innovative approach towards consumer safety has been established by several Indian manufacturers by adopting accurate labeling practices, thereby informing the Indian consumer regarding nutrition, ingredients, allergens, and claims.

Diets Are Popular in India

In 2016, Hindustan Times reported that 21% of Indians follow a gluten-free diet and 16% of Indians are vegan. Though India accounts for less than 1% of the global organic market, there is a rightful buzz of organic food among Indian consumers. New local players like Ketofy, Sai Food Products, Flat Tummies and Varya’s are manufacturing gluten-free biscuits, bread, protein bars, and other foods. The Bread Company offers organic bread and cookies with zero refined sugar. Big players like Britannia, Parle, and Cadbury claim to be manufacturing vegan snacks. The sugar-free claim is also rising steadily in the Indian bakery market.

The market is driven by the growing disposable income, rising per capita consumption by middle-class Indians, a rising trend of gifting gourmet goods, clean label and product transparency, a wide availability of flavors, awareness about consuming low- or no-oil foods, a growing desire for products with long shelf-life and continued demand for instant glucose source.

On the other hand, the rise in obesity and diabetes and safety concerns at small establishments are among the restraints of the sector. A growing interest in unconventional bakery products and a rapid expansion in rural India are seen as opportunities.

Bakes goods consumption is also influenced by evolving lifestyles, the increasing use in celebratory occasions, egg-free bakery offerings, café culture gaining popularity, and cake shops serving readymade pizza and sandwiches. Indians also demand designer cakes, record a rising preference as evening snacks, hike in sales of nutrition-dense travel snacks, while the prominence of home bakers is growing.