Four trends that will shape our food future

Every crisis comes with seeds of opportunity. In the new normal, that opportunity lies firmly within the home. Instead of dining out in the BC (before Covid) era, attention is now firmly fixed on dining in. As more metropolitan Indians take up cooking, the comforting but complex recipes of our past, rooted in cultures of our families and regions, may be winning over soulless derivative dining.

As we step into the brave new world, more mindful, healthful, and culturally rooted flavours are changing the way we experience food, and ushering in that change are our own kitchen experiments.

Rediscovering the joy of homely dishes

While some did rely on convenient Maggi and packaged pasta dinners, a tidal wave of experimentation in regional and community specific recipes seems to have swept into many home kitchens. Social media is full of pictures of homely, often overlooked dishes such as lau chingri (bottle gourd cooked with shrimps), Manglorean pineapple menaskai, Old Delhi’s bedmi aloo, Nepali chutney, Parsi fish curry, sookhi urad of western UP, DIY paani puris and “pressure-cooker” cakes. The discourse has shifted to nostalgia and wholesomeness, overtaking aspirational Instagrammable food. As art curator Bhavna Kakkar says, “I have been cooking everything from beetroot kadhi to mango curry, tasty bhi, healthy bhi”. Flavours anchored in our regional cultures are very definitely “in”.

For those who found it difficult to balance office and kitchen, there were home cooks supplying these flavours via WhatsApp. Even restaurants that reopened for deliveries have been quick to realise this shift in consumer preference over conventional “restaurant” food. “One of my best-selling dishes in delivery is the CKP prawn pulao,” says chef Chiquita Gulati of Spice Market Delhi, that serves commercial staples like butter chicken and dal makhni but also has a new line of Maharashtrian and Gujarati dishes that is doing well. The CKP pulao, a dish of the Chandraseniya Kayasth Prabhu community is barely known outside Pune, the bastion of the community. “I learnt it from my 85-year-old great aunt, who wanted me to write it down when her memory started failing. It is the taste of my childhood and when I put it on my menu, I did not expect it to be so popular with our regulars,” says Gulati.

Cooking businesses get creative

The shift to substance over style is also spurring new business ideas. Siblings Tarika and Rishiv Khattar , children of restaurateur Rohit Khattar, who owns top restaurants like Indian Accent, Chor Bizarre and Comorin, have started an online venture called Makery — “home cooking made simple”. Conceived as a one-stop website (and future app) for everything that a home cook needs, Makery has just started doorstep deliveries of its DIY kits with recipes in collaboration with top restaurants and home cooks. “People will be cooking a lot more, and we want to be that one platform where they can find everything, from advice to equipment and ingredients,” say the siblings.

Other artisanal convenience products are also emerging. Azure Hospitality, the group behind Mamagoto restaurants, has developed small-batch sauces, different from generic off-the-shelf pastes. “I am having fun developing all these in my kitchen. The qorma gravy contains browned onions and cashews like you would use in your own kitchen and is preservative free,” says Janti Duggal, a well-known home cook and food consultant for Azure.

Organic gets a boost

Attention to high-quality, healthy ingredients is a premise that many businesses are working on since many urban families are paying more attention to health. In fact, one of the biggest changes in buying habits has been in the increase in millennial Indians looking to buy organic produce directly from farmers. The mango season particularly witnessed a spurt in this model. With exports hit, several farmers in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Telangana started supplying fruit via WhatsApp to housing societies directly. “We noticed that during the lockdown, people wanted to buy directly from us because they wanted fewer intermediaries handling the produce. This is a vertical we will now develop in the future,” says Sneh Yadav of Tijara Farms who grows only organic seasonal vegetables and grain.

Top chefs do takeaway

With restaurants impacted, the delivery business has got a spurt and it is changing—in a good way. Instead of laying on lower prices for a mass market (the average value per order used to be Rs 200-300, in the pre-Covid days), the model is changing towards high value orders. Top restaurants and chefs getting into deliveries means that there is a shift to better quality at higher prices, though the price tightrope is going to be key. “Brands that connote trust and quality and are transparent about hygiene will be preferred by customers over anonymous cloud kitchens,” points out chef Saransh Goila of Goila Butter Chicken, Mumbai. Fine food at fair prices is what these new upscale delivery brands are trying to create without the frills or “buzz” of restaurant dining of yore.

In many ways, the new normal looks like a refreshing serve.