Biriyani Days: The Pandemic and the Profits

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What do you do when you are stuck at home during the pandemic? Invest in yourself and learn new skills of course. But, what is fun yet essential skill that all of us should have? That’s right, cooking and not just cooking anything, cooking biriyani! Most Indians are biriyani freaks, ask anyone their favorite lunch meal and we are sure that Biriyani will be top among them.  From the north to south, east to west India is known for its wide range of biriyani flavors.

With biriyani sitting at the first position nationwide for the top orders across all major food delivery apps, it should come as no surprise that the most searched food recipe over this time has been for biriyani. While there was a certain spike in ‘Biriyani Recipe’ searches, there was also a notable spike in topics like ‘Donne Biryani’, ‘Hyderabadi Dum Biryani recipe’, ‘Egg Biryani’ and ‘Dum Biryani’. “Chicken biriyani’ was also the most searched Indian food globally for the year 2019, according to sources at global digital marketing and SEO platform SEMrush. There has been a growing interest in DIY Biriyani kits during the past few months.

Apart from the chicken, meat, or eggs that are key ingredients for biriyani, there has been a growing demand for another key ingredient, Basmati rice. Ajay Motwani, head of marketing at Adani Wilmar, which sells Fortune Basmati rice confirms that there has been a spike in the demand over the past several months in the high double digits range when compared with the same data from last year. He says this demand is being driven by two factors – interest in cooking recipes at home and the trend of choosing packaged rice over the loose alternatives. Fortune has pushed the promotion of their Basmati rice saying that it is of high quality and untouched by hands.

Along with the rice, brands selling spices have also seen a spike in their sales. Companies like Kohinoor are now turning their attention to selling DIY kits that are in high demand these days. Kohinoor has also been promoting the kits in partnership with celebrity chef Ranveer Brar. Kohinoor is also seeing consumer demand for new flavours and new additions like Kolkata, Malabari, and Chettinad may already be in the making.