Trade Insights

A lot of European food and lifestyle brands rule out India before they've really looked at it. The assumption is understandable: a market of over a billion people, most of it thought of as price sensitive, doesn't sound like natural territory for a premium or luxury product. It's a fair instinct. It's also increasingly out of date. India isn't one market with one price point. It's several markets layered on top of each other, and the layer that matters for premium brands has

Our last two pieces looked at India's grocery market as a whole, and then narrowed into premium and specialty grocery, the segment built for products like yours. There is a third channel worth understanding before you finalise a go-to-market plan, and it did not exist a few years ago: quick commerce. What quick commerce actually is Quick commerce, often shortened to q-commerce, is the model behind apps like Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart. Instead of next-day delivery, t

The Segment That Actually Stocks Imported Food India's best-known example is Nature's Basket. Founded in 2005 by the Godrej Group and acquired by Spencer's Retail (RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group) in 2019, it now operates more than 30 stores across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Kolkata, and Delhi-NCR. These stores are built specifically around imported ingredients, gourmet foods, and artisanal products. Its customer base perfectly matches the profile European F&B brands target: affluent, u

India's grocery market is really two markets operating side by side. Understanding the split, and where it's moving, is the first thing any European food brand needs to grasp before deciding how to enter. A market defined by scale, and by duality India's retail sector is on track to grow from US$779 billion in 2019 to US$1,41 trillion by 2026, and beyond US$1,8 trillion by 2030, according to Kearney. Food and grocery is the anchor category within it: the one Indians buy daily

For almost twenty years, exporting to India was something most European confectionery and biscuit brands filed under "someday." Import duties on processed food routinely ran 30 to 50 percent, on top of all the usual cost and complexity of getting a product onto shelves in a new country. That calculation just changed, and it changed a lot. In January 2026, the European Union and India concluded negotiations on what European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called "the