Functional Foods: Marketing ‘Health’ To Modern India

• Purpose – The paper provides an overview of the impact of urbanization on the health of Indians and the dynamic market of Functional Foods mapping the competitive landscape and the firm’s marketing effort.
• Design/methodology/approach – The study involves exhaustive desk research to explore, assimilate and analyse data to derive relevant information on market and marketing of Functional Foods in India. A variety of sources including the company sources, government agencies, consulting reports, scholarly papers and expert opinions have been explored.
• Findings – The functional food market in India is growing at a rapid pace as health as a value has percolated in the Indian society undergoing dramatic demographic shifts. The functional food market is innovation driven and dominated by Multinational companies. Ayurveda forms the basis of many Functional Food products sold in the Indian market and has been tapped predominantly by the domestic firms. Edible oil and dairy are two most important functional foods categories.
• Research limitations/implications – The research is based on the data from secondary sources and does not involve primary data collection. The research also suffers from a limitation of not having scholarly papers on Functional Foods market in the Indian context. To overcome this limitation the sources from industry, consulting reports and expert opinions have been referred.
• Originality/value – To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that provides insights on the Functional Foods market in India and may form the basis for further empirical research to gain consumer insights.