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‘Breakfast everyone!’ shouted Sonu Chawla from her kitchen. ‘Hot pesarattus.’ ‘Hot what?’ asked her daughter as she approached the breakfast table. Dad Deven explained, ‘It’s just a fancy name for a dosa.’ ‘Much you know about it,’ retorted the mother, as their maid, Ushatai, brought the steaming, green pancakes to the table. ‘Pesarattu, Rhea, is a whole moong based green dosa from Andhra.’

She further rattled off, ‘Pesar pappu means moong dal. Unlike a regular dosa, this batter needs no fermentation. Pesarattu goes with spicy ginger chutney. Try the chutney!’

Rhea gingerly took a bite of the new dish and grinned. ‘It tastes yummy.’ ‘Mmm…,’ agreed Deven. ‘Certainly very different from a dosa.

Now I know what a pesarattu tastes like, thanks to my Googlehappy wife!’ Sundays, says Sonu, are her ‘new food’ days, when she tries out something new from a recipe that she gets from friends, on the Internet or sees on TV. It isn’t easy to get all the ingredients, though. For the pesarattu, she struck lucky. She got the batter from her supermarket, and the original chutney flavouring was her own contribution to make the dish unique.

Having a full-time maid means that she can do these innovations without too much trouble. It is Ushatai, not Sonu, who brings the hot pancakes to the table. Indeed, Sonu has come a long way from the days when the Sunday breakfast invariably consisted of dahi paratha.

Now, every weekend, she makes it a point to try out something new, a phenomenon, she admits freely, that would not be possible without the array of batters, pastes and ingredients that are now available in the stores.

Deven and Sonu live with their 10 year old daughter Rhea in New Bombay. Deven works for a multinational and, Sonu for a high end architect’s firm. They lead busy lives but Sonu enjoys her periodic kitchen adventures.

Conventional marketing wisdom says that as more and more urban women like Sonu get qualified and enter employment and as incomes rise, people move to heat and eat convenience foods.

The reality is proving to have a definite twist, though. The task of providing timely meals to the family every day falls to Ushatai, not Sonu. The latter only supports it. Unlike her own mother’s days, the kitchen is no longer a place for dutiful cooking – a chore – for the young professional. That part is ably handled by her maid. Sonu “manages” the responsibility instead of “doing” it.

For Sonu, the kitchen is increasingly a leisure, fun and skill demonstration place. Weekends and days when she entertains guests at home, are her “special” days for cooking.

The food adventure at home smoothly swings between ethnic Indian and global cuisines. In the Punjabi Chawla household, bruschettas and pesarattus are equally exotic. They both get their unique “Sonu” touch, too. Her fajitas with a ‘bhuna masala’ touch are a rage with their friends.

” My son needed a T- shirt. At the store I decided to buy, not just one, but two; I thought the colour would suit him and festival season is upon us.” This is a familiar, oft repeated conversation – about simple T- shirts, sweets, lipsticks, dry fruits, across all kinds of families. A little extra expense or indulgence for oneself, a gift for someone, goodies for the family, all get justified on the ‘ hook’ of upcoming festivals. A marketer’s delight is if customers feel good about life and buy just that little more stuff, little premium stuff, beyond the usual, when they shop. And they usually do, when there’s a festival. Festivals and shopping are interlinked everywhere in the world. Special food, special toys, special home goods, gifts, all are associated with festivals, whether it’s Easter, Ramzan, Christmas or Thanksgiving. Marketers in India are particularly blessed since we have a more than generous quota of festivals in our annual calendar! We buy special food, eat more, wear new clothes, get homes painted, curtains and crockery changed and bring home a new TV, sofa, car or a nice gold bracelet for a loved one. Exactly what the marketers would like us to do! Even when we observe a fast ( a euphemism for more consumption!) we end up buying different atta, vegetables, fruits or new things to offer the gods! It almost feels like in the mythological era some holy men were persuaded by shopkeepers to write into the scriptures many ways to buy different new things for every festival! Middle class India, having grown up in the socialist era, has an instinctive guilt about consumption beyond the necessities. But incomes have been distinctly growing in the last decade or so. Our per capita income was $ 440 at the beginning of the millennium and is $ 1000 today. So all the talk of price rise and inflation apart, incomes have been doubling every 5- 6 years for a vast number of families, after many generations of stagnation. When incomes grow, aspirations do too. It’s only natural. Mothers and fathers who grew up in the 70s or earlier need a lot of persuasion and reasoning to change the television or a car that’s just three years old and in working condition, or to discard a shirt that’s just a year old and not even faded or frayed at the collar. They have the money now, but yet their mindset needs to change for spending it. They still require a rationale, and festivals provide it, beautifully. ou can buy for others, family members and the house – you bought the new LCD TV not because you wanted it but because your kids desired it. And the nicely accommodating system of ‘ auspicious occasions’ defuses the extravagant feel of a gold chain for the spouse. It’s almost as if on the ladder of social climbing, festivals provide a helping hand. Festivals as occasions of shared happiness and merrymaking are also becoming more inclusive and modern. The media plays a major role in creating a pan- Indian identity for each festival so that it now travels across the country to include many more communities, thus becoming far less parochial. ‘ Karva Chawth’ parties and Diwali night outs are growing in appeal, universally. What about the economic downturn and global recession? Visit any mall in India and you’ll have the answer buzzing right in front of you. The growing crowds there certainly don’t fear a gloomy future, neither are they in a mood to cut down on spending. We may complain and adjust a bit from time to time, but the overall mood is upbeat on the shopping front. I believe the financial media ( the pink papers and blue TV channels) amplify the global worries and make ordinary urban folks over- consume the gloom. As I see it, barring a few sectors, household real incomes are increasing and the impact on greater consumption is indubitable. Indian marketers don’t need to create special days and events. They need to just tune into the hundreds of festivities already wired into our communities. Ads have to merely say, ” Do diye aur jalayen” or ask ” Iss diwali kis ko khush karenge aap?” and the customers are happily decoding the message into buying more to bring happiness home. They have always decoded it through generations but now they have the money to make it happen. Be happy, ” diwali aa rahi hai”! —

“Nobody home, aunty?” I asked when my friend’s mom opened the door and the dimly lit house behind her had no signs of life.

“Come on in, I’ll call everyone,” she said and knocked on two bedroom doors. Out came my friend, his wife, and their two sons from behind shut doors. Everyone was home! The bedrooms are air conditioned, so the doors are shut and people are locked inside.

Air-conditioning, it seems, isn’t just cooling people down, it is also cooling them towards each other. Closed doors inevitably lead to people becoming distant from each other. It’s scarcely an exaggeration to say that every member of a modern, middle class family prefers to spend time shut in her own room, isolated in their own air-conditioned environment. And the trend is spreading fast. In spite of the erratic power supply in all Indian towns, more and more households are installing an AC, and many have moved up to at least two.

Till only five years ago, an AC at home was more an exception than a rule. For the present generation of householders, ‘AC’ special and occasional access only. In our movies, as in our lives, only the big boss in the office had a window AC in his cabin. Remember balding Utpal Dutt, Rehman or Sanjeev Kumar occupying offices with thick curtains, wooden desks and intercoms with four buttons? Restaurants had special ‘AC family rooms’, where the same masala dosa cost four rupees more, a trend that continues to this day in smaller eateries. When you were in an air-conditioned room, you felt special and perhaps behaved a little special too.

Then air-conditioners started entering homes in a big way. First they entered the master bedrooms. And that led to that room being shut off from the rest of the house. To begin with, usage was occasional, but gradually, with greater familiarity, from being a luxury it became an everyday affair, a utility that kept people firmly inside their rooms. True, the cool air was shared by the whole family, and in summer months it wasn’t unusual to see the household use the master bedroom as the centre of all activity, sort of a surrogate living room – cum – dining room. Incidentally, this was also the first step towards having a television installed in the bedroom. But coming back to the point of AC’s becoming agents of change, it wasn’t long before rising incomes, dropping prices and an explosion in choice led to ‘mini AC’s’ ie, 0.75 ton machines being fitted in the children’s bedroom.

Now the master bedroom was no longer the centre of attraction. The AC in the children’s bedroom didn’t create just two family units, it created three. The parents were in their room, the children shut behind their own bedroom door, and the grandparents became free to use the rest of the house, something they had done earlier but not without the rest of the family. Add to this the spreading use of the laptop, and proliferation of mobile phones and presto! Everyone in the house is a self-contained unit. . Family ‘get together’ has assumed a different meaning. Dinners and special activities is when the full family has a chance to ‘get together’. Earlier, privacy was a special occasion, now togetherness is! In fact the Indian family, epitomized in movies like ‘Hum Aapke Hain Kaun’ and ‘Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’, where the entire household was seen to be living in common areas, with open doors all round, is slowly metamorphosing into an individualistic unit.

Builders have been quick to catch on to this trend. Many new apartments boast of pre-fitted AC’s in every room. Tenants now demand one from their landlords. Where once households had to take special ‘load sanction’ from the electricity supply corporation if they wanted to fit an AC, now there is no such restriction. The electricity supply is geared towards higher consumption models.

This cannot be stopped. Just as cars cannot be taken off the road, though they are not in public interest. Every individual wants one. A personal vehicle makes sense to the citizen, even if it doesn’t to the city. So also, though we all know that AC’s are power-inefficient and not environment-friendly, we all want one for ourselves. In our towns, the air cooler penetration is 7%, while AC’s is below 1%. This will keep zooming upwards. A recent industry reports projects that growth in AC sales will be faster than car sales, in the next decade.
For now the sellers of air conditioners would do well to permeate popular culture expressions, and help more people break the guilt barrier in embracing the first bedroom AC. Dakshaben on the popular soap, for instance, can be shown to fumble with the AC remote to cool her bedroom after a visit to the temple. The aging father in films can exhort his son to study hard so that he can live in an air conditioned house. After the fridge, TV and washing machine, air conditioning is the next big habit shift waiting to happen in many urban homes. Making this change apparent in popular culture will provided the change of gear to its adoption.

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Reshma is a thirty-two year old bank executive who loves going to the malls in Gurgaon on her days off. She loves browsing through the stores there. She treats these visits as outings, and not mere shopping trips. A few weeks ago, Reshma had to kit up for a forthcoming wedding. Her first instinct was to reach for the mall. Surely she would find a suitable sari store there. However, after an afternoon of hunting, Reshma chose to head for Karol Bagh, the sari bazaar of Delhi. Somehow she couldn’t reconcile herself to picking out saris from a single store. In Karol Bagh, Reshma picked her way through four different stores before finding what she liked. It was tedious to go all the way to Karol Bagh, and she was unhappy about the squalor and heat there, but ultimately, she had to acknowledge, the superb range of offerings won the day. It was enjoyable to go to the mall, but there was simply no comparison when it came to merchandise.

Come to think of it, the same could be said of many of the things that Reshma bought. Shoes, for instance. She tried to buy them during her occasional visits to Central Delhi, where there’s a shoe bazaar where there’s every brand of footwear, Bata, Lord’s, Metro, Regal, Catwalk and many more, apart from the unbranded variety, on sale. In the shoe bazaar, one is spoilt for choice as one never is in a mall, where there’ll be just a couple of shoe stores.

There is no doubt that the modern mall has proved to be a boon for the Indian shopper. That is why it became successful as soon as it was introduced just about a decade ago in this country. It is air-conditioned, clean, with plush interiors and every comfort necessary for pleasant shopping, including that most important amenity, a clean toilet! Even so why does an ardent mall-visitor like Reshma prefer to go to the bazaar when it comes to ‘real’ shopping? Because a bazaar, unlike the average mall, offers huge variety. Each product is available in all its variants, at all possible prices. In strolling through the shops, the customer feels a sense of empowerment. Here, she knows, she will get the best possible value. When there are multiple players selling the same category, power shifts to the consumer. A customer like Reshma intuitively knows this and she knows that the bazaar in its design provides safely from overpricing, cheating, and therefore there is greater comfort in buying from there. And for this single benefit, she is willing to bear all the inconvenience of a bazaar. Instinctively the gap between browsing and buying dramatically reduces on a bazaar street. Malls, on the other hand, face tentative browsing and chronic lower conversion rates.

A bazaar, of course, cannot become a mall. But can’t a mall become a bazaar? Is the essential difference between a mall and an Indian high street so irreconcilable? The layout of traditional Indian bazaars centers around offering variety in a single product. Each street of a bazaar is devoted to a different product, and every vendor on that street offers basically the same merchandise or a small variation thereof. There are streets for jewelers, saris, shoes, light fittings, furniture, sanitary fittings, costume jewelry, silversmiths, edible oil and so on.

To the modern mindset this kind of layout is an anachronism. In modern society, it is believed, time is at a premium and so, shoppers should be grateful for the convenience of a mall, where everything is available under one roof. Of course, the variety is less, but that’s a trade off one has to make. This is, perhaps, the logic that mall-owners follow when designing their product mix.

Mall-owners forget that just as in everything else, in shopping habits too Indian society is a mix of the traditional and modern. Customers still hanker after the delight of browsing through a bazaar street, secure in the knowledge that within a small perimeter, every possible variant of the product is on offer. There is something extremely satisfying in knowing that one has the opportunity to see everything before buying one thing. Malls do not satisfy this need except in two areas.

The concept of a food court has met with unbounded success. It is akin to a bazaar when it comes to eating. All kinds of cuisine at every price are available. And the Indian shopper loves it. That’s why mall owners have opted to open food courts more than stand alone restaurants. Indeed on this front, the malls are way ahead of traditional bazaars.

The other bazaar to be found in a mall is the multiplex theatre. Movies catering to every taste and preference can be viewed under one roof.

As in food and movies, why not in other things? Just as in every service, a mall, too, cannot be all things to all people. But it will certainly win if it becomes all things to some people. A mall can choose to be known for shoes, for instance. Apart from the usual mix of stand-alone stores and department stores, a mall-owner can decide to invite every shoe brand to open a store in his premises. In course of time, this mall will be known as the ‘shoe’ mall, just as Linking Road in Bandra in Mumbai is known as the ‘shoe bazaar’ of the city. Similarly, another mall can become the sari mall, or the jewelry mall, or the men’s fashion mall. Such a move will offer the best of both worlds to the Indian shopper, modern shopping in a traditional layout, a layout that transfers power into the hands of the shopper, and gives her the impression that all the shopkeepers are competing for her custom.

The Indian shopper, unlike in the West, has a lot of choice. Malls, if they have to become shopping destinations, need to compete with the traditional Indian bazaar in the mind of the shopper. A strong way to do this would be to replicate the bazaar in one part of their premises, so that their offering becomes what it isn’t so far, a complete one.

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In the last five years, something very interesting has happened to refrigerators in India. In fact, it is almost a revolution, though a silent one, and if studied well enough, can give marketers some interesting clues into the changing kitchen habits of the urban Indian consumer. So what’s changing in our lives and the industry as a result of this revolution? We checked the refrigerator contents and habits surrounding them, with a large number of urban homes.

Preeti Mehta, a suburban housewife in Mumbai, started out her married life ten years ago with a 165 liter standard refrigerator. It stocked water, dairy products, eggs and vegetables. There was just enough space remaining for cooked leftovers. Five years later, Preeti graduated to a 300 liter frost free behemoth. Even with almost double the space, in no time, Preeti realized that fridges have a magical property of becoming full and crammed for space.
Here’s what she did with the larger fridge. Some obvious items crept in – more juices, cold drinks, breezers, etc. A family pack of ice cream has also found a permanent place. “Something has improved in recent years, I wonder with the ice creams or the freezers. Family packs ice creams now stay soft when stored for many days”, says Preeti.

More significantly, the family’s adventures with eating out are now becoming experiments at home. Items like paneer, baby corn, mushrooms, frozen peas, coconut milk, chocolate syrup were things that went into restaurant food earlier. Now they are part of a well-stocked home kitchen. Now the Mehta family can indulge in palak paneer or exotic appams for dinner at home, at short notice.
Another habit change. There are pouches of milk in the freezer. Milk has stopped coming early in the morning in many homes. The horrible stories of adulteration of milk haven’t helped, nor has the fact that the delivery boys have upped their charges to 1 rupee per liter. Preeti has discovered that the new supermarket stocks polybag milk at a great price. It makes sense to stock it up for three days at a time. The large freezer can easily hold such purchases. She doesn’t think the same with the milk in tetra packs that does not spoil for 90 days. “Any honest milk worth its fat must spoil in a few days, isn’t it?” is the simple argument!
Preeti buys her vegetables from the neighbourhood market, which she visits once a week. There are five members in the family, and vegetable consumption is large. It was impossible earlier to stock so many vegetables. Now Preeti is basking in the convenience of shopping for a whole week at one go. Ironically, in the case of fresh produce, Preeti doesn’t trust the cold chain of the neighbourhood supermarket! She refuses to buy fruits and vegetables from its refrigerators. This, she believes, is a way of selling stale food to the non-discerning customer. Of course, there’s no difference between the refrigerator at home, and the one in the store, but she doesn’t see that!

Every other urban middle-class family has bought a new, larger fridge in the last few years. Collectively, we urban Indians buy about 4 million refrigerators – that’s a 100 crore liter ‘cold chain capacity’ – every year! The total installed refrigerator capacity is 1000 crore liters, and it is growing rapidly. That’s a significant cold chain inside our own homes! And that extra large ‘cold chain’ at home is slowly changing the way we buy milk, fruits, vegetables completely.
Not everything has changed, however! Take cooked food, for instance. This takes up the same shelf capacity as in earlier times. Only leftovers are refrigerated. “Thanda matlab bassi” (cold food is stale) continues to apply. No cooking on weekends for consuming through the week, we are Indians.
Batter, chopped vegetables, kneaded dough, chutney, ginger-garlic pastes, gravy packs, all find increasing space in the cold cupboard- but ready-cooked food made two days back? Not yet! Science may tell us there’s nothing wrong with pre-made, refrigerated food, but the cultural imprint on “fresh, hot, nutritious khana” for the family is tough to break.

The new, swanky refrigerator in the middle-class kitchen is giving us some interesting pointers at the ever-changing food habits of Indians. Though new habits are forming, old shibboleths and fixations continue to hold firm. Most significantly, we are still not ready for ready-to-eat, but we are slowly getting to love our ‘ready-to-cook’ food. Sellers of this category are going to see their fortunes change with our changing habits around the expanding refrigerator. Those marketers who identify the timings of big changes will make us happy as consumers and will make themselves rich in the process!

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Raghuraj Pillai works in a software firm in Gurgaon. He dreams of returning to his native Kerala someday. What he misses most is matta rice and tapioca that his mother used to cook for him.

In Gurgaon, he doesn’t get those ingredients. So eating authentic Malayali cuisine is a once a year event for Raghuraj. So is eating authentic Gujarati fafdas and theplas for Nitesh Ambani, living in Boston, US.

Nitesh moved to the US fifteen years ago, and craves the food of his childhood. Unbelievably Nitesh has one option that Raghuraj doesn’t. He can go to the neighbourhood Indian store in Boston, which specialises in Gujarati snacks, and buy whatever he likes in frozen form.

Like every Indian, he craves freshly cooked food, but the frozen variety does manage to bridge the gap between the two extremes of alien food and home-cooked food. So often Nitesh buys a bag of frozen, ready to eat goodies, many of which have been manufactured in India.

Swad brand of Indian foods and Ching’s Secret brands on ‘Indian’ Chinese products are exported to 20 countries including the US and Australia and retailed largely through the Indian stores there, but increasingly through regular supermarkets also.

Researchers in the recipe development lab know what the neighbourhood mithaiwala has always known: that Gujaratis love their paatra when it’s slightly oily; a little addition of besan to the dough is the magic formula for stuffed parathas that many people enjoy eating the slightly spicy crumbs from their dhokla.

Swad Foods are manufactured in a state of the art factory , but have never been sold in India. Another brand “Maniar” khakhra’s from Rajkot come from a modern packing plant, vacuum packed and in 18 flavours, with a guaranteed shelf life of 6 months. Each of these recipes is carefully developed with feedback from very demanding Indians, but of the non-resident variety!

Thirty million NRI’s living all over the world continue to like Indian food and find most international foods bland and not to their taste. They also represent a cumulative buying power that can rival the domestic Indian market. They are used to modern forms of manufacturing, preserving, freezing and microwaving food.

NRI’s are also willing to pay a premium for homely food. Retail stores promoted by South Asians have caught on to this opportunity. And so have dozens of food item manufacturers and exporters from India. While they export obviously nostalgic Indian brands like Amul, Maggi, Thums Up and Parle G, the real money is made in selling basic packed daals, poha and sabudana and an increasing number of ready to eat and “microwave and eat” products.

Resident Indians, it is true, prefer fresh food, usually made at home. A large proportion of homes has homemakers and domestic help is, even now, readily available. However signs of change are emerging. As incomes and awareness are rising, people are becoming adventurous about food. We try out new food options when eating out, and having dhokla and idli at home and serving hot samosas to guests is becoming a pan India practice.

Such items are cumbersome to make and the modern Indian household is moving towards faster and simpler recipes, and a greater level of outsourcing. So in a majority of homes, the khaman dhokla, steaming idlis and authentic Panjabi samosas are brought from the neighbourhood sweets and savouries shop.

These shops charge a premium, but the price does not out weigh the pain and risk of making things from scratch at home. Creeping doubts over suspect hygiene practices at these shops are there, but we manage to brush these aside to rationalise our habits.

Like it or not, we Indians are gradually moving to a ready to eat ethos. And companies are just waiting in the wings to jump at the opportunity, as soon as we are ready. For instance, Haldiram’s as a brand first flourished with their nitrogen flushed and vacuum packed snacks in the Gulf and the South African markets before the Indian market was ready. All these Indian food companies have an amazing range of authentic recipes and high quality manufacturing units, both fine tuned and perfected for the NRI market. When the size of the opportunity becomes large enough, there will be no lead time required for them to flood supermarket shelves with hundreds of products.

In the meantime you have ‘bombay bhel in a cup’ ready and field tested. Just open the seal, pour out the chutney from the sachet and eat on the go, with the spoon provided. The taste? Authentic Mumbai Chowpatty . Price Rs 15/- only. When you feel like a snack will you have Bombay bhel or ‘cuppa noodle’, if both are equally well packed and easy to eat? I have no doubt what my answer is!

While Indians are gradually moving towards ready-to-eat foods, the solutions are already being created in ‘laboratories’ abroad. Non-resident Indians are creating the demand for these foods, and their production has already reached maturity on Indian soil. Till the time customers of retail stores are ready for the next level products, Patel Bros in Jackson Heights, New York provides adequate business.