Meet the hidden architects of India’s packaged food boom

What looks like a simple snack is, in fact, science at work.

Fat aroma, as managing director Baskaran Parameswaran explains, is the invisible hand behind flavour—the notes of butteriness, caramel, or meatiness that fats bring to food. His team is developing a new recipe for a popular quick service restaurant chain in South India, re-engineering its onion bajjis to fry in half the time, from 10 minutes to just five, without compromising on taste, texture, or smell. For the restaurant, that means faster service, lower costs, and, Baskaran insists, a healthier snack.

“It’s all chemistry,” he says. “When you notice a difference in taste, you need to know which aromatic component is responsible. Is it caramelic? Fatty? Sweet? We analyze, extract, and recreate it in the lab.”

Depending on the client’s need, fat aroma can be made into liquid for beverages, powders for fried foods, or even gels and capsules.

Over the next three hours, the experiments continue: flavored buttermilks, a tea sample designed to mimic a rival brand’s taste, and a fat aroma-induced murukku.

Confluence Valley is among a clutch of consultancies, including Thinking Forks and Prowess Buzz, that work with large companies and young startups alike, helping them translate ideas into products that consumers recognize and crave.

Behind every granola bar, cold brew, or protein snack that becomes a household name, there’s often an unseen partner shaping the recipe and strategy. From Licious’ mayonnaise with meat chunks and Yogabar’s protein bars co-created with Thinking Forks, to Too Yumm’s snacks developed by Prowess Buzz, some of India’s most recognisable food products have come out from such collaborations—often ideated and engineered in labs like this one.

These food research and development (R&D) consultancies thus shape what India eats. They manage everything from recipe design and nutritional profiling, to regulatory compliance and sometimes even manufacturing. But they do it behind the scenes. Food may be one of India’s fastest-growing consumer categories, but the scientific and technical backbone driving the boom remains largely invisible.

Lab behind the label

The food R&D consultancy business in India is still both nascent and niche. Earlier, this space was dominated by individual consultants. Most companies in the business today have sprung up only in the last decade, catering to a mix of FMCG giants and startups. But it is the latter, including companies such as Licious, Yogabar, Sleepy Owl Coffee and Too Yumm, that lean most heavily on them.

Big food companies typically have in-house product development teams. Younger brands, often led by founders without food science backgrounds, turn to external specialists for everything from recipe design to regulatory approvals. When a company approaches an R&D consultancy, there is initially a discussion of the idea, after which the consultancy gets to work and there is a series of tasting and prototypes. Once approved, depending on the contract, the consultancy helps the food company commercialize the product.

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The consultancies have eclectic teams: chemistry graduates, seasoned food technologists and scientists, chefs, and tasters. The business model varies, too. Some charge a one-time service fee, while others, such as Confluence Valley, also generate revenue by selling proprietary flavours.

The range of requests these companies handle is vast. A startup might want to transform a back-of-the-napkin idea into a frozen meal; others come seeking to replicate runaway successes from abroad, say, Kunafa chocolate from Dubai, or to benchmark their products against rivals. Still others want to ride new consumer waves: clean-label, protein-packed snacks, or fibre-enriched foods.

“Recipe development is only a small component of the work,” says Gourinandan Tonpe, co-founder and CEO of Thinking Forks, a Bengaluru-based R&D consulting firm. “Product development involves identifying the right suppliers of raw materials, the right processes, preservation techniques, regulations, manufacturing, nutrition, packaging. Recipe is ultimately what brings the consumer back, but it sits on top of a very complex foundation.”

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For Khetika, a clean-label brand, this expertise was invaluable when it began operations. The company’s brief was non-negotiable: every product had to be 100% preservative-free while preserving nutritional integrity and taste. “There have been instances where the R&D partners made a product significantly better,” says Prithwi Singh, cofounder and CEO. “For example, the agency suggested multi-layered packaging for our chutneys to extend shelf life without preservatives.”

While Khetika now conducts most of its R&D in-house, Singh told Mint it continues to rely on external experts when launching entirely new product lines, for fresh perspectives and benchmarking. Currently, it is working with an R&D agency to create blended spices.

The biggest challenge, according to Singh, is to find a solution to eliminate the use of any preservatives or chemicals in the yet-to-be launched range of spices. A majority of blended masalas have four-five chemicals, he noted.

Trendy, new and bizarre

The latest obsession in food R&D is clean-label, preservative-free, nutritionally dense products. If it was all about taste before covid, since the pandemic it’s taste plus health, say consultants.

“Back then, I was flooded with briefs on plant-based meat. Not anymore. Now, it’s protein and more protein. Before that, it was caffeine-loaded everything. And now it’s around gut health,” says Thinking Forks’ Tonpe.

Some client ideas can be fascinating and wildly ambitious. Tonpe recalls one brand that wanted an all-in-one sprinkling product that could be stirred into literally anything—rasam, dal, sabzi—and deliver vitamins, minerals, fibre, and probiotics. The challenge: it couldn’t change the taste, colour, or smell of the food. The product didn’t quite work out the way the client envisaged it. Thinking Forks also worked with a company that was trying to make plant-based eggs with chickpeas and other ingredients. While the product eventually got made, it found few takers in the market.

Confluence Valley’s Baskaran has his own list of quirky briefs. A client wanted “a menu for water,” so his team got busy with alkaline water, aloe water, vitamin water, fibre-infused water, even botox water. In another project, he worked with an entrepreneur to prepare jackfruit-and-molasses laddoos for cows. And then, there were mint-flavored toothpicks bound for a Scandinavian market. While some of these products become commercial successes, many others don’t survive the market test.

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For another food consultant, Space Food Club’s Zaid Khan, the hardest nut to crack was a frozen pizza that had to balance taste, texture, and cost. These days, though, the hot trend is Korean flavors. “Every other company is asking for chilli-based burgers, sauces, or wants to launch K-pop-inspired carts,” he says.

Vision meets science

For many food entrepreneurs, the journey from idea to product is often more winding than expected. Timelines, costs, and the science behind recipe development rarely align with the initial assumptions that founders bring to the table.

A common request from founders is to create preservative-free products. But as Baskaran pointed out, that isn’t always possible. “You need something to ensure shelf life, otherwise the product won’t last.”

Cost is another factor that often reshapes a founder’s vision. Tonpe recalled the example of the client who wanted the same formulation of a sprinkler that could be used in all gravies and beverages, including tea. “We had to explain that it wasn’t possible as one ingredient changed the colour of tea due to chemical reactions. Plus, staying within cost limits means we can’t always include everything a founder wants. The product has to be viable for consumers, too.”

Perhaps the most frequent request today is for sugar-free products that taste clean. “That’s the biggest challenge,” Tonpe admitted. “Because the cleanest-tasting sweetener we know is still sugar.”

Cost, scale and next chapter

The cost of working with a food R&D consultancy varies widely, depending on the complexity of the product and other services availed by a company. A simple recipe might start at around ₹40,000, while more advanced formulations can run into lakhs. For example, a basic protein bar can cost about ₹40,000–50,000 to develop. At the higher end, for instance, Space Food Club charged about ₹1.5 lakh to engineer a fried chicken recipe that could match the taste of a popular QSR chain in India.

Brownies, surprisingly, proved even trickier. “A client wanted packaged brownies with a longer shelf life. That pushed the cost up to ₹3 lakh, not because brownies are hard to make, but because moisture makes extending shelf life a real challenge,” says Space Food Club’s Zaid. “The project itself took about two-and-a-half months, with recipe trials and shelf-life testing running in parallel.”

Although food R&D companies often generate modest revenue themselves, they have a disproportionate impact on the top lines of their clients. Thinking Forks earned ₹7.5 crore in 2023-24, and Confluence Valley generated revenue of about ₹20 crore, according to data sourced from Tracxn. The latter’s revenue also includes fragrances, which it sells to FMCG companies for products such as shampoos and soaps.

Although food R&D companies often generate modest revenue themselves, they have a disproportionate impact on the top lines of their clients.

Food consultancies do not require any certification to operate. Thinking Forks says it has had over 600 clients and works with about 60 at any time, while Prowess Buzz claims it has worked with over 100 clients. The team sizes are typically small and range between 15 and 40 employees for most companies.

While partnerships between food companies and R&D consultancies have created some big products, they don’t always come easy, or last. Without clear communication and aligned goals, deliverables may fall short or require costly rework.

Many startups lean on R&D consultancies in their early stages, then shift development in-house for more control and speed.

“We realised that for a fast-moving brand with core values of ‘no synthetic preservatives or artificial colours and flavours’ like ours, it made more sense to build strong in-house capabilities. This not only gave us greater control over timelines, but also proved more cost-effective in the long run,” says Gaurav Manchanda, founder & director, WellBe Foods, a snacking brand.

Startups want to move fast, while consultancies may follow slower, structured processes. Product trials, for instance, are less about speed and more about precision. “Each trial can only change one parameter at a time,” explained Khan. “I can run 10 trials in a day, but that won’t get us anywhere if I’m changing salt, sugar, and spices together. We need to know exactly what’s driving the change in taste or texture. That’s why it’s a step-by-step process that takes time.”

In the US and Europe, outsourcing food R&D is far more common and structured. Large FMCG companies and mid-sized brands routinely work with specialist firms for product development. In India, however, startups often turn to consultancies out of necessity rather than strategy. While big companies such as Nestlé, Tata Consumer Products, Cadbury, or Unilever have long invested in their own in-house labs, smaller startups simply don’t have that luxury.

But ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in market acceptance of the product developed and scale. Consultancies can formulate and prototype kitchen-scale products—a kilo or two. That’s easy. But producing consistently, and at industrial scale, while maintaining taste and texture is always difficult, Tonpe agrees.

For investors, too, food R&D isn’t just about creating new products, but ensuring they can scale. “We’ve seen consultancies help businesses rethink what they sell, whether that means making healthier versions, adapting products for specific markets, or simplifying operations for scale,” says Ankur Mittal, co-founder of IPV, an investor in food companies such as Samosa Singh. “But consultancies alone can’t make the pivot happen. The real value comes when founders, consultants, and investors work together to ensure new ideas align with business and market goals.”