India's export of ready-to-eat food products jumps by 24%

India’s export of ready-to-eat food products recorded a sharp jump of 24 per cent in the first seven months of the current financial year. The cumulative export of three categories comprising ready-to-eat, ready-to-cook and ready-to-serve products was more than $2 billion in the last financial year.

NEW DELHI: India’s export of ready-to-eat food products recorded a sharp jump of 24 per cent in the first seven months of the current financial year as the cumulative export of three categories included in the final food products comprising ready-to-eat, ready-to-cook and ready-to-serve products was more than $2 billion in the last financial year.

According to the latest official data available with the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCIS), India’s exports of ready-to-eat products rose by 24 per cent to $394 million during the April-October period of the current financial year in comparison with the export during the same period of the last fiscal.

Major export items under the ready-to-eat category are biscuits and confectionery, Indian sweets and snacks and breakfast cereals. Officials said in the last decade, the share of final food products such as ready-to-eat (RTE), ready-to-cook (RTC) and ready-to-serve (RTS) food products under the APEDA basket has registered significant growth.

It is the result of the government’s policy to promote value addition in India’s food export because of which the ready-to-eat food export registered a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12 per cent in the last decade and its share in the APEDA export basked increased from 2.1per cent to 5 per cent during the same period.

The FY 2020-21 data showed that the world’s largest economy, the USA was the biggest importer of India’s ready-to-eat products with 18.73 per cent share followed by the UAE (8.64 per cent), Nepal (5 per cent), Canada (4.77 per cent), Sri Lanka (4.47 per cent), Australia (4.2 per cent), Sudan (2.95 per cent), United Kingdom (2.88 per cent), Nigeria (2.38 per cent) and Singapore (2.01 per cent).

India exported more than $ 2.14 billion worth of final food products in 2020-21. Officials said since final food products are time-saving and readily available, the demand for food items under the categories of RTE, RTC and RTS has increased manifold in recent years. As a result, India's export of these products rose to over $1 billion in April-October last against the export of $823 million during the same period of FY 2020-21. The cumulative export of these products during the last three financial years has been over $5.4 billion.

High demand for Indian biscuits, confectionary

India’s ready-to-eat products that are in high demand include biscuits and confectionery, jaggery, breakfast cereals, wafers, Indian sweets and snacks, Pan Masala and betel nuts among other things. In the last financial year, biscuits and confectionery and Indian sweets and snacks constituted a major share of nearly 90% in the export of ready-to-eat items.

If one looks at the individual share then biscuits and confectionery outperform all other segments with over 52% share followed by Indian sweets and snacks (37.04 per cent), breakfast cereals (4.11 per cent), Pan Masala and Betel Nuts (3.28 per cent), wafers (1.73 per cent) and Jaggery (1.52 per cent).