Food & Beverage market research in India

Cost follows the sample, the seniority of the audience and the number of cities. Reaching consumers costs a fraction of what it costs to reach retailers, so the audience mix moves the number far more than the headline interview count. Send a brief and you get a fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours.

Start where the sector concentrates — Kolkata, Indore, Nashik, Kochi, Amritsar — then add markets that match your distribution rather than the national map. Most clients run four to eight cities so results can be compared side by side.

Each audience has its own written screener and its own frame. Respondents are de-duplicated against past projects, fieldwork is GPS- and timestamp-logged, 10% are re-contacted on a back-check and 10% of audio is audited by a supervisor who did not conduct the interview.

Fieldwork of the scope described above runs 4–6 weeks, with hall tests run over consecutive weekends, and the whole project is typically 7–9 weeks from sign-off to debrief. Fieldwork usually begins five to seven working days after sign-off, once screeners and translations are approved.

For this sector we most often use product & concept testing, consumer research, pricing research, ethnographic research. The right combination depends on whether you need to size something, explain it or test it — a brief that names the decision gets a sharper design than one that names a method.

Test products are prepared and held under FSSAI-aligned hygiene and temperature control, batch-coded, and discarded after the session. Alongside that, all personal data is collected on informed consent, held in India, pseudonymised before analysis and deleted on an agreed schedule, in line with the DPDP Act, 2023 and the ESOMAR code.