Recently, during a delightful 45 days in the downtown area of a graceful American city, we frequented an all-in-one food store for our fresh and processed food requirements. Among them were several loaves of various types of sliced bread and, to my delight, each well-made loaf stayed fresh for over 10 days, taking considerable cooking load off our shoulders. I vividly remember simple bread slices dipped in spinach-tomato muti-daal followed by blueberries munched while watching some show. (Note, not bread butter). I am not a fan of bread but the inherently flexible and versatile utility of bread that stretches over weeks, was difficult to resist even for me. This simple incident demonstrates the impossibility of general grading of food categories.

However, such grading – however conditional – is useful when based on ‘essentialness’. (Refer ‘Hierarchy of need of processed foods’ here: https://letfoodliftlife.com/industrial-processed-foods-part-iii-the-dark-side-of-processing-a-case-for-cautious-consumption.) The next obvious step is to get to know the all-important consumer, if possible!

A foolhardy (!) attempt at profiling the Indian food consumer: Economics, as a science, would be a lot less ‘inexact’ if it did not have that undefinable animal at its centre – the human being. That’s you and me. The consumer – a subset of ‘human being’ – has the same influence on a microcosm of economics called the market; I am limiting my presentation to the Indian context. I believe that the ‘complexity of Indian market’ – the bugbear of non-Indian and Indian marketers alike – has less to do with the stability and the clarity of policies of the government and more to do with the Indian consumer. Since she can’t be antagonized, the government becomes a convenient scapegoat! Let’s go and meet her.

A sketch of the Indian consumer: She wants her children to be tall, intelligent and sporty and invests in granular brown beverages which chocolatify the eternal workhorse – milk – and  make grandiose claims. These claims are not even mentioned in the context of the same products in developed markets. She loves noodles because she loves its short cooking time but still makes her indispensable and she is convinced of her smartness when she puts some vegetables in them. Often she has a job to bolster her family’s income without a genuine long term cost-benefit analysis of doing that job. She is happy that she can afford biscuits as her children’s school snack.

She smartly and consistently cold-shouldered olive oil, variants of tomato ketchup, factory-made pickles, factory-made ready-to-eat vegetable dishes, margarines and spreads, aerated brown waters etc. – not that they are extinct. Her response to various versions of flattened corn for breakfast has been lukewarm for decades but she is warming up to oats.

Among non-food categories, her response has been equally ‘mixed’. At least the Gujarati voter – a special segment of a special class of consumers – recently rejected pre-election promises of free water and electricity by a political party on the instinctive grounds that such a thing cannot be sustainable and would ultimately work against them. But she has simply accepted her ‘need’ for different ‘washes’ for her hair, face, hands and body! Not very comfortable with English language as a means of communication, she surfs the net for hours looking for the latest gossip and sale offers.  A few decades back, the exasperated but delightful Hinglish title of Ms. Rama Bijapurkar’s book attempting to explain the behavior of the Indian consumer was:  ‘We are like that only’.

Consumer’s dilemmas and difficulties vis-a-vis processed foods: We can treat the processed food market as triad of players: consumer, marketer and government.

Marketer must recover all his myriad variable and fixed costs in making the product available to the stretched hand. But he has a few aces up his sleeve: 1. Economy of scale is his legitimate advantage, providing some leeway in deciding what part of that advantage to share with the consumer (to create competitive price advantage) and what to keep as his profit, on a continuously varying basis. 2. There are many deterrents to making most products at home and this applies not just to freeze-dried lemon juice powder and processed cheese. Even edible oils (refined as well as unrefined), sugar, milk, salt, butter, spices etc. must be bought from the market. 3. The cost advantage in some processed bought-outs is often obvious to the consumer e.g. biscuits and cookies and condensed milk. 4. Generally, coconut products must be bought at higher prices by all living north of Vindhyas, alphonso mango products by all east of Maharashtra coast and apple products by all living south of Himachal Pradesh. 

Government is happy to collect taxes on manufactured food products, on the prepared dishes served in restaurants and on those delivered at homes. It would like marketers to offer a wide variety of products on a large scale but after following environmental and safety-related responsibility. 

Consumer makes her buy-out or make-at-home or avoid-altogether decisions on the basis of the above-mentioned hierarchy of needs for processed foods. Of course, her ‘value system’ is derived from her economic and cultural background. The sheer variety in this creates humungous variations in consumer types. This extremely varied group of consumers has the tough task of making those buying decisions from ever expanding categories and variants in most of them. We will take up pointed category-wise advice in the next post.

Let us now take up a delightful ‘case’ where the blame can be shifted to the consumer!

The delicious dilemma of ‘salty crackers’: The concept of ‘causal sequence’ says that everything we observe as phenomenon has a cause behind it and invariably leaves behind an effect.  In supposedly health-conscious times, the longevity of salty crackers – an unapologetic hyper-processed happiness food with poor nutrition – should not have any cause going for it. But it has been around for ages and does not look like it’s going anywhere.  

It is made from refined flour (lacking protein, vitamins, minerals, fibre), hydrogenated oils (containing trans fatty acids) or palm oil (containing saturated palmitic acid) and salt and baking soda (need I say more?)  with or without flavouring spices. All hyper-processed. It is consumed as a snack with tea or coffee which are themselves sweetened with sugar and usually contain milk fat. Salted to varying extents, they have simple irresistibility even though they lack the ‘sweet tooth’ appeal of biscuits and cookies which increasingly also carry nuts, raisins and non-wheat flours. Now let’s watch two people eat them.

Ramesh is having them on a plate (though he often walks about with a stack in his hand) and is also sipping tea to accentuate the alternative delight of two contrasting foods. He is definitely not stopping at one or two. His other favourite: bread-butter.

Geeta has a bowl of hot, fibrous-proteinaceous Mexican soup (beans or rajma, tomatoes, capsicum, onion, garlic, limited salt and her favourite unrefined sesame oil) in front of her. She has thickened it with a special gut-healthy ingredient that also helps fight constipation, hypertension, cancers and diabetes and has a low fat shredded cheese garnish. She picks up two salty crackers – left over by Ramesh who was too embarrassed to finish off the entire packet – and crumbles them over her soup. Quickly picking up her soup spoon, she starts enjoying the texture combination of a gooey soup and softening cracker bits. Breakfast over, light-footed and buoyant, she leaves for work, happy that a large quantity of the same soup in the fridge will make the dinner in the evening in combination with her family’s favourite ‘vada pao’. Home-made, of course. Geeta’s other favorite breakfast: paratha made with leftover daal and whatever greens are available.

Now the questions:

Who is enjoying crackers more? More smartly?

What do you think each will have for lunch?

Who is headed towards self-esteem boosting health and happiness?

Who is at fault, the consumer or the marketer? 

Do share your views with us.

Complex situation, simple solution: As we can see, the ‘adopt or avoid’ decisions in respect of processed foods can be complex. But excessive complexity often has simple solutions. The case of industrial hydrogenation of edible oils to produce ‘hard fats’ (like vanaspati) is a classical example. It is one of the most complex processes conducted industrially but can be controlled simply thru external control of process conditions. Thus the product of the process can be pretty much predicted in advance, bypassing all the complexity. Thus:

1. Sugar, salt, edible oils, grains and cereals, legumes and lentils (kathol and daal), fruits and vegetables, green and dry spices, milk and dairy products etc. have to be bought from the market. How each of these can be made safer thru home precautions is a separate topic.

2. The adopt-avoid decisions vis-a-vis processed foods are limited to relatively few optional processed foods.

3. As we have seen earlier, being smart and judicious is the name of the game. A product is not bad; you can make it work for or against you.

4. Some food products can be exploited thru multiple uses to add value to life.

5. Cooking at home is an utter delight that strengthens bonds. We now make bread, all dry spices (including powdered red chilli and turmeric), most milk products, frozen fruit pulps, lemon juice, tomato ketchup (increasingly, its more delicious and safer alternative), chyavanprash, spice powders….and some innovative new products at home. All with elaborate pre-cooking cleaning protocols.

6. Watching the positive results of your initiatives can be satisfying.

Next post: Popular processed food categories: an overview

And some practical avoid-adopt advice

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