Coronavirus pandemic has made all of us to think, what we should eat , where
we get the food from, and how the food is produced, stored, and prepared.
More questions, no doubt, will be asked of how, and in what manner, scientific modification of food is happening, and even deeper queries about how the food is made available at industrial levels including the impact of chemicals and hormones in the food. These questions about food will have a lasting impact on our living habits.
From the pre-covid days the movement of vegan and vegetarian food
was in vogue due to growing health concerns and well being in India and
especially in the western countries.
After the outbreak of pandemic the demand for vegetarian food, specifically
is going to rise exponentially, domestically as well globally. In the absence of a vaccine to fight corona, the consumers are trying to increase their immunity by chemical free food grown naturally and organically. This is leading to a surge in demand for organic and sustainable foods.
The outbreak of the coronavirus has opened new possibilities for a global
restructuring of supply chains with less of the blind dependence on China that the world has seen in recent years. Many of the raw food supply /ingredients used by the European and North America organic food companies are produced in Asia ,Latin America and Africa. India is the major source of tea, spices, herbs, soya meal and other various products.
The unprecedented demand for organic food is due to the traceability of
origins are known right from cultivation to processed as organic. To ensure
best possible quality of organic products there is also a need to maintain
much more clean and hygienic environment . Here lies the responsibility of
certification bodies who are been entrusted the responsibility by the
regulators to keep a strict surveillance on the entire process from farm to fork before they certify.
The present global market size is US $105 billion.The leading markets are USA, Germany, France, Canada (Biofach 2020).It is reported that due to coronavirus pandemic, retailers across the globe are experiencing hefty sales increases for organic products with a rise to 25%-100%. The question is where will all this organic food come from? Who will fulfil the demand supply gap. Could India step in as a global supplier of organic food? India has some natural advantages but also some supply constraints, which, if fixed, would make the country a natural source to fulfil global demand in organic food.
At the home front ,the online organic food business is growing at astounding rates, and the explosion is to follow . Online retailers are reporting the highest sales growth.The demand of organic products can be further harnessed by innovation and the development of new products . Government is trying its best to encourage companies to take up and utilise these opportunities in sustaining and achieving this growth.