COVID-19 impact | Not just essentials, demand for packaged foods also surges

Consumers were mainly stocking up processed items such as chips, nachos, namkeen, biscuits, among others.

Himadri Buch

April 10, 2020 / 17:26 IST

As they prepared for weeks of lockdown during coronavirus pandemic, consumers stocked up on not just essentials but also packaged/processed foods.

Experts said demand for packaged foods surged as people consider it to be comfort food and hygienic. Some experts believe salted snacks gained more binge value as limited options became available.

According to Nielsen India research, from February to mid-March, orders of salty snacks went up by 84 percent, soft drinks and biscuits went up by 68 percent and 31 percent, respectively, on an e-commerce platform.

Consumers were mainly stocking up processed items such as chips, nachos, namkeen, biscuits, among others. Easy-to-cook products such as noodles, pastas were also picked up in bulk by consumers.

Also, consumers preferred vegetarian food over non-veg in the current situation.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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