Packaged Opportunities

- Ashok Malkani

The Indian bakery market was valued at over 6 billion USD in 2017 and is expected to grow at a steady pace to exceed 11 billion USD by 2023, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 10 percent. In fact, India’s bakery market at Rs. 49.5 billion tonnes makes it the third largest market in Asia-Pacific, only after Japan and Australia.

The bakery products can be roughly segmented into breads and rolls, cakes and pastries, rusks and biscuits. The two major bakery segments -- breads and biscuits account for about 82 percent of the total bakery products in India.

Packaging in Bakery

Not only breads and biscuits, but for almost all bakery products, packaging plays a crucial role. One of the important ancillary aspects of the bakery industry is packaging as almost every bakery product needs to be packaged.

In a paper published in the journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety in November 2017, Selçuk Yildirim from Zurich University of Applied Science in Switzerland and colleagues explained that packaging also meets the fundamental need to maintain food quality and safety from production to final consumption by preventing any unwanted chemical and biological changes. Hence, packaging acts as a barrier to protect the food from environmental influences such as oxygen, moisture, light, dust, pests, volatiles, and both chemical and microbiological contamination. 

The protective role of the packaging is primarily passive, acting as a barrier between the food, the atmosphere surrounding the food, and the external environment, the paper said.