By: Varun Madan, Founder & CEO, Salad Days
Every few years, someone asks me where food in India is headed next. My answer keeps changing a little, because the ground keeps shifting under us. Building Salad Days has put me close enough to that shift to watch it happen in real time, in what people order, what they ask about before they order it, and what they no longer think twice about. Here is one prediction I am happy to make: by 2030, healthy eating in India will not feel like a separate category anymore. It will simply be eating.
Industry estimates for India’s healthy food market vary widely. Some research firms size it in the tens of billions of dollars today; others put it closer to a hundred billion, depending on how broadly “healthy food” is defined. But almost every estimate agrees on the trajectory: high single-digit to double-digit annual growth through the next decade. What excites me is not the precision of any one number, but what sits underneath all of them: a generation of Indians who no longer see nutrition and indulgence as opposing forces, and a food industry that is finally building for that reality instead of fighting it.
From Category to Culture
For years, “healthy food” in India existed as a niche shelf in the supermarket or a separate tab on a delivery app. By 2030, I believe that distinction will largely disappear. Health will not be something people opt into on special occasions. It will be baked into the default menu, the default grocery basket, and the default way restaurants think about their offerings.
Millets are the clearest evidence this is already underway, and the story is more dramatic than most people realise. Per capita millet consumption in India had been in decline for decades, falling from around 32 kg a year in the 1960s to roughly 4 kg a year in recent times, as rice and wheat took over both diets and public distribution systems. That decline is reversing: government figures cited by the Prime Minister at the Global Millets Conference put current household consumption at around 14 kg per person per month, with sales of millet-based food products up close to 30 percent. That is not a niche trend. That is a category coming back from the edge of irrelevance. I expect the next few years to bring more of this pattern: ingredients that were never actually unhealthy, only unfashionable for a while, returning to the mainstream plate.
Technology as the Quiet Enabler
I do not think the future of healthy eating in India will look like a science fiction film full of lab-grown everything. I think it will look far more practical than that, and the infrastructure for it is already in place. UPI now handles over 17 billion transactions a month, and digital payments account for more than 90 percent of food delivery transactions in India. That frictionless backbone is something most consumers never think about, but it is what makes everything else in this industry possible. Food delivery platforms are already layering AI-driven personalisation and hyperlocal logistics on top of it.
Consumer-facing personalisation will grow from here, but I suspect it will be gentler than the hype suggests: fewer dramatic gadgets, more everyday nudges built quietly into ordering and delivery systems. The technology that wins will be the technology people barely notice.
Tier 2 and Tier 3 Cities Will Lead, Not Follow
One of the most exciting shifts I anticipate by 2030 is geographic, and it is already showing up in the order data. Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities now account for close to half of all food delivery orders by volume in India, and cities like Lucknow, Jaipur, Indore, Coimbatore, and Visakhapatnam are seeing some of the fastest expansion of quick service and organised dining formats in the country. This is not a future trend. It is the present distribution of demand.
I expect these cities to bring something valuable back into the mainstream: a stronger connection to local, seasonal, and traditional foods. The India of 2030 will not simply import global wellness trends. It will export its own, built on ingredients like millets, moringa, and fermented foods that were never really unhealthy to begin with.
Sustainability Will Stop Being Optional
By 2030, I believe sustainability and health will be spoken about in the same breath, not as two separate conversations. This is already becoming a policy story, not just a consumer sentiment one. In January 2025, the Indian government revised its standards for organic agricultural products under the National Programme for Organic Production, aligning them more closely with EU frameworks to improve transparency and oversight. Organic foods are also, by most estimates, the single largest segment within India’s broader healthy food market today, a sign that “clean label” preferences are backed by real purchasing behaviour, not just survey answers.
Businesses that treat sustainability as a compliance checkbox will fall behind. Businesses that treat it as a genuine design principle, from farm to packaging to last-mile delivery, will define the next decade of Indian food.
If I had to sum up where this is all heading, I would say India’s healthy food industry in 2030 will be less about following the West and more about rediscovering itself with better tools. We will still eat dal-chawal. We will still celebrate with mithai. But alongside that, we will have built an ecosystem that makes the nutritious choice the easy choice, the transparent choice, and increasingly, the default choice. That is not a distant vision. It is already under construction, one meal, one harvest, and one informed decision at a time.
Published On Aug 14, 2026 at 11:25 AM IST
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