Healthy Foods Market Sizing: Triangulating an Ambiguous Category

Samrudhi was asked to size the healthy foods segment within FMCG, a category where the market data was thin and the definition of the category itself was contested. The brief was to assess whether the segment was large enough to warrant entry.

The first challenge was definitional. Expert calls with FMCG specialists produced different answers about what counted as healthy food, with some including better-for-you products from large established players and others applying a stricter standard. Samrudhi resolved this by anchoring the definition: healthy food was defined as products that were genuinely difficult to afford as a discretionary purchase, excluding the better-for-you claims of mainstream FMCG brands. This narrowed the scope and made the supply-side estimates more comparable.

She then built three sizing methodologies. The supply-side approach aggregated market sizes across specific categories, including pulses, beverages, breakfast, and snacks, using expert inputs to estimate the healthy share of each. The gym-goers approach estimated the population of active gym users and applied a monthly spend assumption per person. The household approach, which Samrudhi designed herself, took total Indian households, applied an urban filter and an affordability screen for upper-income urban consumers, and multiplied by an estimated per-household monthly spend on healthy food.

The gym-goers and household approaches triangulated reasonably well. The supply-side approach diverged, largely because of the definitional variation across expert calls. Samrudhi documented the divergence and the assumptions behind each method, so the output was transparent about its limitations.

The analysis gave the team a defensible range for the market size and a clear view of the methodological constraints.