At the 2026 Public Policy Dialogue on Food Systems at ISB Hyderabad, a roundtable brought together practitioners, chefs, researchers, and entrepreneurs working at different points in India's food system. The question on the table: how is the changing consumer landscape shaping business and policy — and are markets and policy actually keeping up?
The conversation surfaced something that deserves wider attention.
Awareness is not the lever
There is a default assumption built into most food system interventions: if people knew more about nutrition, they would make better choices. This places the burden of the system's failures squarely on the individual's knowledge gap.
The roundtable pushed back on this. Awareness matters, but it operates alongside three other forces that are often more decisive: desirability, affordability, and accessibility. A fully informed consumer cannot choose what is not stocked nearby, what exceeds the household budget, or what carries social stigma in their immediate context. Food decisions are made under time pressure, within social norms, and with limited options. The knowledge is often not the constraint.
Putting awareness at the centre of food policy is not just insufficient. It can actively obscure where the real leverage sits.
Food is relational — and the system mostly ignores this
Food is bound to memory, identity, and care in ways that nutritional or economic framing consistently misses. Traditional food knowledge — seasonal rhythms, locally adapted recipes, fermentation and preservation practices — carries nutritional and ecological intelligence that industrial food systems have largely discarded in the pursuit of scale.
In urban India, this knowledge survives in a particular register: the weekend farmers' market, the specialty grocer, the curated restaurant menu. Accessible to those with time, money, and the cultural capital to find them meaningful. For migrants navigating economic constraints, core cultural foods are lost not by choice but by circumstance — ingredients unavailable or expensive, cooking time and kitchen access limited.
The food system can celebrate culinary diversity in one market segment while making it structurally difficult to sustain in another. That is not a consumer behaviour problem. It is a structural one.
The math of running a values-driven food business
The roundtable also examined the business side. Running a values-driven food business in an Indian city means navigating delivery platform commissions, urban real estate costs, and staff compensation — a financial structure that pushes businesses toward trade-offs: cheaper ingredients, smaller portions, convenience-led menus. The intent to offer good food is real. The conditions that would make it consistently viable are often absent.
What emerged from the conversation was that scale does not have to mean size. Businesses built on proximity, direct relationships, and neighbourhood trust — visible across Pune, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru — suggest a different model: depth rather than breadth. The density of a place-based network, where producers know their harvest has a reliable home and consumers know where their food comes from.
The cold-pressed oil shops appearing in urban neighbourhoods illustrate this literally: by bringing production and consumption closer, they create more than a retail transaction. A local economy with shared stakes. The harder question is what minimum viable scale looks like for this model — and whether policy can help it get there.
Where the real question sits
The roundtable did not resolve these tensions. It was not designed to. But it clarified something important: the consumer is not the right unit of analysis for food system change.
The more generative question is what structural, cultural, and economic conditions would need to change for more people to have a genuine and equitable relationship with food — food that is good for them and meaningful to them. Policy levers around subsidies, labelling, PDS distribution, and institutional procurement all shape that environment in ways that no amount of consumer awareness can override.
That conversation — about policy as a deliberate lever, not just a background condition — is one the roundtable identified as urgently worth having. It ran out of time before getting there.
