Has the pandemic changed Bengaluru's eating habits?

There are two sections of people, one that chose the healthy route and the other that found comfort in food during troubling times

Last year, Swiggy launched ‘HealthHub’ a dedicated section on their app that curates healthy food. They recently revealed that 20 per cent more Indians ate healthy in January 2021 and Bengaluru tops the list.

According to Swiggy’s annual StatEATstics report for 2020, Bengaluru ordered out most of any Indian city. Chicken biryani topped the list of most ordered food, followed by masala dosa, paneer butter masala, chicken fried rice and garlic breadsticks; none of which fit the bill of ‘healthy’.

But the report also stated that the city saw the highest increase in healthy food orders on Swiggy HealthHub at 130 per cent.

Have Bengalureans become healthier during the pandemic? Dietician and nutritionist Dr Edwina Raj, says that while people are slowly starting to care more about their bodies, attention towards eating habits had drastically dropped since the beginning of the pandemic.

“Maybe a certain section is ordering more healthy food but we have seen a large increase in ailments like diabetes, blood pressure and even heart attacks in young adults that indicate otherwise,” she says.

She explains that a lot of people didn’t have access to healthy food and many of their daily routines got disrupted leading to lethargy. “Many existing patients also deviated from their diet plan,” she says.

But in the past few months, she has seen the highest number of people coming in for consults as they are worried about their health. “Maybe due to the same concern people are reaching out to such delivery platforms to get easy access to healthy meals,” she says.

But personally, she has observed that many restaurants in the city that are catering to the ‘health’ segment are closing down.

“There used to be more options pre-pandemic, perhaps there are more options online but you can’t definitively say that the city has gotten healthier during the pandemic,” she says.

She opines that from the kinds of patients she has seen in the past year things have gotten worse during the pandemic.

“But I do believe that there is an increased concern for health that can be seen again. Maybe this survey is a sign of that,” she says optimistically.

One of the companies that Swiggy saw increased orders from is Order for Health (O4H). Founded in February 2020, co-founder Pravin Chaudhary says that they identified a market for healthy food in the city prior to the launch. “We were obviously not expecting the pandemic and it did dull our launch as we had to shut down for a month after the lockdown was announced,” he says.

But from August of last year, they saw exponential growth. “We grew as much as 500 per cent and to date, we see an increase of 20 to 25 per cent every month,” he says. Pravin admits that while the growth is positive, the pandemic has not created more demand than was expected.

“People are definitely more conscious of what they eat and put into their bodies but our growth would have been higher if not for the pandemic. We were targeting office lunches and with that many others are exposed to our food when just one person orders. Now we have to rely heavily on word of mouth,” he says.