India is the third-largest packaged food market in the world. It is expected to cross $100 billion by 2030. Indians spend more on snacks per capita than most people imagine, and the category is growing faster than almost any other in FMCG.
Yet if you walk through the snacks section of a modern trade store today — the kind in a Reliance Smart or a D-Mart — it looks almost identical to how it did a decade ago. The same legacy brands, the same flavour variants, the same tired packaging with the same slightly-too-much-yellow.
The challengers solved the wrong problem
The challenger brands that have appeared in recent years mostly tried to solve the wrong problem. They saw 'Indian snacks' and optimised for health. Baked, not fried. Low sodium. High protein. Millet-based. Keto-friendly. These are fine products. They are not exciting products.
Nobody craves a millet puff at 11pm. Nobody passes a packet of low-sodium rice cakes around during a cricket match. Nobody brings a 'clean-label biscuit' to a Diwali gathering and gets a reaction.
Craving is not a nutrition problem. It is a sensory problem, an emotional problem, a cultural problem. And that is the problem worth solving.
What the market actually has
India has extraordinary raw material. The flavour vocabulary of Indian cuisine is among the richest in the world. Our regional snack traditions are wildly inventive — each state has its own deep pantry of textures and preparations that most of the country has never encountered outside of home cooking. And our consumers, particularly in the 18–35 cohort, are more quality-aware, more curious, and more willing to pay for something genuinely good than any generation before them.
What has been missing is not a healthier snack. It's a bolder one. One that takes Indian flavour seriously as a competitive advantage, not as a marketing checkbox. One that earns loyalty through the product, not through nostalgia or novelty.
The ambition gap
The ambition gap in Indian packaged snacks is not about formulation or distribution or even brand design — though all of those need work. It's about what founders and product teams believe Indian consumers deserve. The assumption that Indian buyers are primarily price-sensitive and will trade quality for a lower MRP has been quietly disproved by every premium food category that has grown in the last five years.
That's the gap we're building toward closing. A brand that doesn't ask Indian consumers to compromise between great taste and a product they can feel good about. One that starts with the craving and works backward from there.