India’s organic food market, worth roughly $2.3 billion in 2025, is projected to grow above 19 per cent annually to cross $11 billion by 2034.
| Photo Credit:
Walk down the pantry aisle of any large Indian supermarket today, and you’ll see a shift that would have seemed strange a decade ago. Shoppers are reading ghee labels the way they once read health supplements – checking A1 versus A2, cow versus buffalo, churning method. What used to be undifferentiated commodities, bought on price and habit, are being re-examined, re-priced and re-valued. The industry calls this premiumisation.The numbers back it up. India’s organic food market, worth roughly $2.3 billion in 2025, is projected to grow above 19 per cent annually to cross $11 billion by 2034, as per IMARC Group. This is no longer a niche indulgence: PwC’s 2025 Voice of the Consumer survey found that 84 per cent of Indian respondents are now actively looking for safer, healthier food and 73 per cent are willing to pay more for food produced in a manner that is more sustainable for the land.3 driving factorsThere are three driving factors behind this trend. Firstly, trust: years of headlines about diluted milk, adulterated honey and ‘analogue’ paneer have made consumers read labels – sugar-syrup adulteration in honey, for instance, now requires testing via Nuclear Magnetic Resonance that most labs don’t have. Secondly, health: post-pandemic awareness about diabetes and heart disease has made households turn to less processed sweeteners and oils. Thirdly, access: direct-to-consumer brands and e-commerce have brought traceable, farm-sourced products to consumers in a way that wasn’t possible a decade ago.Ghee shows this most clearly. While the overall category grows at a healthy pace, its A2 and organic sub-segment is expanding at over 22 per cent annually between 2025 and 2033 — nearly three times faster, per IMARC Group. That’s the market paying for provenance, not just fat content.Honey’s story is really about trust. Because adulteration has been the category’s defining controversy, brands that invest in testing and disclose source and season are pulling ahead. India’s honey market, worth close to ₹2,900 crore in 2025, is expected to grow at nearly 7 percent annually and most of that growth looks set to go to brands that can prove their purity claims, not simply state them.Jaggery’s striking reversalJaggery has had the most striking reversal. Once seen as a rural staple, packaged jaggery – hygienically processed and traceable, rather than sold loose – is now growing above 11 per cent annually, on course to more than double in value by the early 2030s, as households swap it in for refined sugar.Cold-pressed and wood-pressed oils tell the most interesting version of this story, because they’re growing inside an otherwise sluggish market. India’s edible oil market is enormous but grows at barely 1 per cent a year overall; within it, cold-pressed oils are the fastest-growing slice, despite costing 40 to 70 per cent more than refined oil and having a shorter shelf life.None of this should be read as an uncomplicated success story. Premiumisation cuts both ways – for every brand doing the real work of building a traceable supply chain, another is simply putting a rustic label and a higher price on a product that hasn’t actually changed. Consumers are getting better at spotting the difference, and regulators are tightening labelling and disclosure norms too, which is healthy for the category.The fundamental shiftWhat has fundamentally shifted is not the price point of these everyday products, but the questions now asked by Indian consumers. Where does this come from? Who makes it and can they be trusted? And implicitly—does this truly represent what Mr. R.K. Sinha and the organic food movement call Vishmukt Ahaar: nourishment authentically free from anything that poisons, adulterates, or deceives? Like every parent making choices at their family table, consumers increasingly understand that compromising on purity—however marginally—is not worth saving a few rupees.For every brand genuinely standing by this principle, another attracts consumers with a rustic aesthetic and premium pricing while the product itself remains unchanged. Consumers are becoming sophisticated at making this distinction. Regulators are tightening standards accordingly. And that distinction—authentic commitment to purity versus opportunistic marketing—is the real driver of transformation in the Indian pantry.The author is Managing Director, Adya Organics.Published on September 5, 2026
