A growing interest in regional cuisines is increasingly driving snack companies to tinker with their current portfolios, and sparking a group of younger entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds to launch new varieties into the market.
Indian recipes particularly have a unique advantage of innovating the soaring snack business that is valued at more than $600 billion in sales worldwide due to their complex flavor profiles and deep-rooted health benefits.
Through studying tens of thousands of domestic recipes from Bengali to Punjabi, researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology have previously revealed, unlike many Western dishes pairing ingredients that share flavor compounds, Indian food shows a strong signature of negative food pairing, meaning hardly any ingredients in one item share identical attributes.
The result is a typical Indian dish can include more than 12 different herbs and spices that are able to stimulate more taste buds compared with cuisines of other nationalities.
Additionally, the benefits of curcumin, the main bioactive ingredient in turmeric, and chickpeas — both common to traditional Indian cooking — are also increasingly adopted by Western consumers, which give food and beverage companies, such as Biena Snacks and GT’s Living Foods a competitive advantage in the health and wellness market.
