Priya Sen, a homemaker in Mumbai, India's financial capital, is very particular about the quality of food her family takes. Being a trained nutritionist also helps her in choosing the right food for her family. Whenever she visits neighborhood grocery or food stores, she looks for lite cooking oil, low fat items, low sugar products and organic food and avoids products with artificial flavors. She believes that people have to be conscious about the food they eat. More and more consumers like her, from metros to the semi-urban areas, are now increasingly becoming health- and calorie-conscious individuals.
Sensing this shift in consumer preference, FMCG companies are now jumping on the health bandwagon. These companies are asking their R&D to come up with innovative products, based on the Health and Wellness (H&W) platform. Low-fat butter from Nutralite, Atta Noodles from Maggi, wholesome variant soups from Kellogg's are some of the few examples that show the trend is spreading across the board. In the H&W market, it is the food companies who are giving maximum emphasis to the new trend. Companies such as HLL, Nestlé, Amul, Dabur, ITC foods, PepsiCo and many more are sprucing up their product portfolio with health and wellness flavors. And going by projections, in all likelihood the trend is only to gather further momentum. For instance, the research firm Euromonitor estimated a turnover of over $2.5 bn (Rs. 111.5 bn) in 2006, for the H&W packaged food business in Indiaan expansion of over 40% since 2002. |
