Over the past decade, demand for fast food and snacks like potato chips and chocolate has stalled in North America and much of Europe. Greater awareness of the health benefits of eating better and exercising are part of it, so is the recent surge in appetite suppressing drugs like ozepic that's left makers of fatty, sugary, salty snacks in search of customers in other parts of the globe. One place
they've found it is India. Sales of snacks and soft drinks have almost tripled there from a decade ago, topping thirty billion dollars last year. But Bloomberg's Pratique Parigia and Kai Schultz report that the popularity of high calorie, low nutrition food in India has also come with rising rates of obesity and diabetes, which are especially problematic for kids. I'm westc today on the Big Take How India came
to crave fast food. Partikin Kai joined me from New Delhi and I asked Partique why snack food makers look to India as one of their next big markets.
The food habits right, you know, I'm in Indian slave fried food, burgers and pizzas so Indians are sort of experimenting with other westernized food and then the companies have got it figured out that you know, Indians love it, so that's why they're targeted. And it's also in terms of pricing their competitively priced. There is a price advantage as well, and the companies have got it figured out, so that's why they're targeting, targeting Indians in cities as well as small towns. KAI.
What are some of the foods that are being introduced to India that are new that you just didn't see a few years ago.
Process food is still a relatively new phenomenon in India and part of the reason that it's quite popular here is because it is a novelty and there isn't as much public health awareness about the potential dangers of consuming copious amounts of it. So in grocery stores today you'll see, in particular, lots of breakfast cereals, lots of different chocolates,
lots of confectionery items in general. And these are very popular across demographics in India, not just in the bigger cities, but also now in more rural parts of the country where companies like Coca Cola are experimenting with selling small sized portions of these items, keeping in mind the kind of price sensitivities that are at play in India.
As it develops, kind of the story starts with a scene in a classroom in India where a nutritionist is trying to teach kids about healthy food options. She grows kind of frustrated. Can you tell us what happened?
So this nutritionist has been doing these seminars with young students outside deli for several years now, and what she's found is that there's a real excitement for junk food within this demographic.
Yes, as we look at unhealthy options, I really enjoy maggie and like noodles and ramen. But if you look at healthy snacks at home, I really enjoy Indian snacks like sweete Mattai, et cetera.
And so many of her activities are designed to spread public health awareness about the pitfalls of having too much McDonald's or too many potato.
Chips, fruit and vegetables or vitamins and minerals very good. So, now when you eat aluka parata, does my fist clothes with the number of food groups coming into that Alu cobs, okay and the fats, so cobs, grains, wheat, flour, potato, everything comes here in this finger, and I've used fat in it. But my finger, Oh god, I can't make a fist. What should have been added? Maybe pulses I could have added, Missirotata.
And what she says too, is that there's a sort of status issue at play here for any of these young students. Going to McDonald's for a birthday party is far more exciting than having a home cooked me out at home.
I had gone to a birthday party of my friends and over there there were many foreign dishes or the dishes from the West, such as pizza berger pasta, and these tasted way different from the dishes or the Indian culture of food. I told my mother after the birthday party about such dishes and how they were one of my cravings.
And so trying to sort of make healthy food attractive for youth is increasingly a challenge in India.
For her, these products are designed, and more than designing, I think it's the marketing piece which creates the impact in the head of the user of the consumer. You know, it's a big buy in our groceries every month, beat the cookies, beat the Maggie or even for that matter, the milk powders which are full of sugar. These days, all of that looks so easy and so attractive to consume because of a strong marketing skill that these companies use.
While there are nutritionists like the one we just heard who are working to educate kids, it is not easy to combat the massive appeal of snack foods, especially for kids. Critique says, many people in India aren't aware of the health risks of eating too much processed foods.
That is, the lack of awareness about these food items like they may cause cardiovascular disease, but then most Indians they don't bother.
So beyond the public health awareness piece that Pritique pointed out, many large food conglomerates are increasingly facing strict regulation and
many of their core markets, particularly in the West. Because these food items are relatively new in India, they have fewer restrictions when it comes to marketing their products, whether that be on television or social media or in grocery stores with the packaging and so this has really created an attractive environment for them to find a massive new market of people who have perhaps less familiarity with some of the challenges of eating junk food regularly and what
those consequences could be over the longer term.
The companies are targeting obviously India, the world's most popular stuntry now, as Kay pointed out, they can't increase their selves elsewhere, so they're targeting India.
And what we're seeing too, is that many of the restrictions that have been put in place in Western markets where junk food has tradition, we've been quite popular, are working to curb sales, Whereas in India, when you look at the growing market for junk food and the change in retail volume, you see pretty dramatic increases across the board for everything from breakfast cereals to chocolate, to sweets
and potato chips. So these regulations that are being put in place in countries like Mexico or Chile, or the United States or parts of Europe have been very effective at sort of changing the tide and public perception of how much junk food is a good idea.
Pritique.
Also right that you're starting to see these snack foods, various junk foods appearing in Bollywood and in other kind of forms of just popular culture in India.
When the show in a movie or in addisement, obviously they show the sales or any food item like burger or any fruit juice, choppiana slice.
You are just a piece for free every day. I love Maggie Masala, a be assorted mushroom broccoli, a baby gone for Maggie medal.
To make it popular, they give these examples in Bollywood movies or elsewhere.
Kai in India. You write that even in metropolitan areas, large supermarkets still aren't very common, and so a lot of these foods are sold in convenience stores. Is this the kind of main competition for just traditional home cook food?
So for a lot of India's history, open air vegetable markets have been the norm, right, so you go outside and you source your produce locally. Typically there are very few options for processed foods. In recent years, we've seen more convenience store chains open up in cities like Delhi, and they sell a mix of items, but typically they're stocked with processed food and they tend to do quite well.
So while the larger supermarkets still aren't common, it's certainly true today that in the bigger cities, at least these convenience store chains are very much upending what used to be a very kind of traditional way of obtaining food in India, which is to go somewhere outside, to barter for the price of onions or potatoes or fruits, and to do a lot of you're cooking at home with whole ingredients.
In partigue, what are some of the big brands that have moved into India and taken up more and more of people's diets.
For breakfast, there's a protocoled Maggie right, It's basically noodles, the deep fried refined flower PRDUG. The brand is owned by Nestley, so Maggie's is very common even in small towns. And then Kellogg's, Kellogg's, Cereals, McDonald's obviously for burger, then Pizza Dominoes or Pizza Hut, big butns.
All the big brands are now in India, whether that's Pringles made by Kelenova formerly Kellogg's or Cereals made by Nesle. You will find pretty much anything that you would find in many other parts of the world, particularly in the West.
In India.
Now they may be sold in more specialty shops, but something like a Coca cola bottle is omnipresent and very accessible to most Indians from a price perspective. What we're finding too, is that a cereal box in India may look very different from a cereal box in another part of the world. So in India, for example, you can still use cartoon characters to sell a box of cereal.
In parts of.
Latin America that's increasingly banned, so you'll no longer be able to find as much messaging that's specifically targeting children.
After the break. How this lack of regulation helps pave the way for fast food sale in the world's most populous nation. Earlier this year, India surpassed China to become the world's most populous country with more than one point four billion people. And with so many people in India now eating fast food, I asked KI what food companies had to say about the potential health impacts of their products.
TeleNova has cut sugar in its chocolate cereal by a fifth. Nesle notes that it voluntarily includes nutrition information on the front packaging of items sold in India, and Unilever has said that the company is committed to providing products that strike a balance between having enough nutrients but also being palatable for consumers. Many of these food companies will say that they are dressing a need in the Indian market. The history of India is one that has been dotted
with famines, with a challenge of under nutrition malnutrition. Now what we're seeing is that the options are plentiful, but diets are increasingly being replaced with ones that involve many empty calories. Many of these food companies will also argue that all of the nutritional information is on the packaging of their items, and the public health activists will come back and say, yes, they're there, but they're buried on the back, They're not featured prominently on the front of
the labeling. And in many cases, the front of the labeling will play up perhaps that a product has high vitamin D or that it's high in protein, but will minimize or ignore or under sell that the sugar content is very high, or that a product has many carbohydrates in it. So there are various ways of obscuring that information that public health activists feel is prevalent now in India, and it's ultimately at the expense, they say of consumers.
As we've seen.
Over the last decade or to the obesity rate in India has surged pretty dramatically, particularly among children, and that's of ever greater concern not just for activists, but also for parents, for schools, for public health officials, and for India more generally, as it attempts to balance its desire for more foreign business with of course, the necessity of protecting public health.
This question of labeling is an important thing for a lot of people who are concerned about what people in India are eating. Why is labeling such a big deal?
Regulation in general of food items is a very recent conversation in India, So until twenty eleven, there was no real regulatory that looked at food and food safety and how to educate consumers about the choices they're making when they go into the grocery store, and so there's still fairly limited public awareness about the dangers of many of
these products. It's also important to note that India only really opened up its economy in the nineties, so until relatively recently, there were a few options available to many people in the country. These are very new entries, and therefore many people don't quite recognize the potential dangers of over consumption. Public health activists are very aware that ultimately the consumer makes the choice about what they want to
eat or not eat. I think where some of the tension lies is how these products are marketed to children, where the choice is far murkier, and where you really have to have much more of a support system around you to understand what exactly you're putting into your about you.
The labeling is a very stranger.
The content is written a very tiny letters, you know, I mean, you don't have the patience, and most of it is in English.
A lot of people can't treat English.
So if a particular packet has a particular quantity of sugar, people aren't going to notice it because the letters are so tiny.
When we come back, what is India's government doing to combat rising obesity rates? Given the health concerns associated with processed foods, especially in kids, I asked Partique what India's government was doing about it.
A couple of years ago, there were meetings by the food regulator to talk about labeling and the meeting was attended by the activist company officials and the government officials, officials from the Food DEGLETA and they were trying to have a consensus on how labeling should be done in the food packets. So what we found out was the company officials they were sort of dominating the meeting. So that's why we.
Haven't seen no big change in leveling in India.
And a note here that India's Health Secretary and Chairperson of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India did not respond to multiple requests from Bloomberg for comment about this story. Kai, you mentioned that childhood obesity rates in India have risen quite a bit. What are the statistics around obesity rates in general in India?
Since India liberalized three decades ago, the adult obesity RAYA has surged. It's more than triple and among children, the rises the steepest in the world, behind Vietnam and Namibia.
Kai and Critique report that as late as the nineteen nineties, India's target was to eradicate extreme hunger. The government put the focus on calories, not nutrition. Some global health experts have even said that being overweight was a symbol of luxury among the affluent. I asked Kai.
About this, because these new food items processed food items are affordable and no more expensive the more traditional options. What we're seeing is that obesity is no longer a disease of the elite. It's now something that's far more widespread across India, touching many different demographics and income levels.
Do you think that the government will begin to step in to try to address some of these concerns about health and nutrition?
The comment should do it because all these activities are after them. So yeah, I mean, sooner or later they may do something. I remember, you know, I like a couple of years ago we did a story saying they were doing the opposite. At a press conference, the food secutive once said that, you know, we want to boost consumption of sugar in the country because there is a
selfless I hope. I think the sooner or later government will make regulations stronger to sort of reduce or control sale of junk food in India.
Last year, the Indian government proposed using health star ratings on the packaging of food, and though that system isn't yet in effect and could still change, and in fact has faced quite a bit of pushback from public health activists, the question is really an open one still about whether that kind of system will have an impact on curbing
unhealthy purchases. And I think it's ultimately something that India and it's one point four billion people can no longer turn away from, particularly as OBC rates go up and as the country looks to be a real destination for various businesses.
Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you, thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Vergolina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. This episode
was produced by Zeneb Sidiki and Federica Romaniela. Phil de Garcia is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take.