A comprehensive study on the market potential of superfoods: A consumer awareness, growth and constraint analysis with special reference to millets and mushrooms

Introduction

Consumers worldwide are moving away from food choices driven mainly by taste, price and convenience towards choices shaped by nutritional value, preventive health and overall wellness. This shift has been accelerated by rising incomes, urbanization, greater exposure to digital and social media health content, and growing concern about lifestyle-related illness. "Superfood" has emerged as the popular label for nutrientdense foods -rich in vitamins, minerals, dietary fibre, protein, antioxidants and other bioactive compounds -even though the term has no formal scientific or regulatory definition. It functions primarily as a marketing and consumer-communication construct that signals high nutritional value relative to a food's calorie content. India offers a particularly relevant setting for studying this market because it combines a deep base of traditional nutrient-dense crops with rapidly modernizing consumption patterns. Millets -including pearl millet, finger millet, foxtail millet, little millet and sorghum -have long been part of Indian diets, especially in semi-arid and rural regions, and are now being repositioned through modern processing, packaging and branding. Mushrooms, meanwhile, represent an emerging agribusiness opportunity: they deliver protein, fibre, vitamins and minerals while requiring comparatively little land relative to conventional livestock-based protein. Both foods illustrate the central premise of this study -that nutritional value alone does not guarantee market success. Adoption depends on consumer awareness, purchasing habits, income, price sensitivity, product availability, perishability and trust in product information. The market potential of such foods therefore needs to be assessed jointly from the consumer side (awareness, perception and purchase behaviour) and the supply side (production trends and growth, and the constraints that limit adoption). This study combines both perspectives, using consumer-level survey evidence, a multi-year production growth analysis, and a structured ranking of marketing and consumption constraints.

Objectives of the study

1. To analyse purchase decisions and consumer awareness towards health-driven food.

2. To study the demographic factors of consumers using healthdriven food.

3. To measure the market potential and growth prospects of healthdriven food.

4. To identify the constraints in using health-driven food.

Hypothesis

H 0: There is no significant growth in market share over the study period.

H 1: There is a significant growth in market share over the study period

Review of literature

Prior research provides converging evidence on the drivers and barriers relevant to superfood adoption. [1] and Kaur et al. (2025) [2] documented high awareness and generally positive attitudes towards millet-based products in urban India, but also an intention-behaviour gap in which awareness did not consistently translate into regular purchase. On demographic influences, Shirur et al. (2015) [3] characterized mushroom consumers as predominantly male, educated, middle-aged and from medium-to-high income groups, while a larger multi-city study by Shirur et al. (2021), covering over 15,000 respondents, found health concerns, weight management and taste to be leading reasons for millet consumption, alongside a notable gap between being health-conscious and being certain that millets are healthy. On market potential and growth, Banga et al. (2013) [4] and Biswas et al. (2024) [5] identified perishability, inadequate transportation and limited processing infrastructure as persistent constraints on mushroom marketing efficiency in Punjab and Uttarakhand respectively, while Pandya et al. (2024) [6] concluded that value addition and improved marketing strategies hold considerable potential for expanding the mushroom sector. Tripathi et al. (2026) [7] highlighted the growing role of digital marketing and e-commerce in improving market access for mushroom-based agribusinesses. On constraints, studies on adjacent superfood categories reinforce similar themes: Ashvina Singh (2024) [8] linked microgreens adoption to income and awareness while noting that low awareness restricts uptake; Avanish et al. (2023) [9] and Bijla (2026) [10] documented cold-storage, spawn-availability and infrastructural constraints among mushroom growers; and Kritika Rawat (2024) [11] found high price, perishability and low awareness to be the principal barriers to microgreens consumption despite generally favourable consumer attitudes. Collectively, this literature establishes that nutritional appeal alone is insufficient for market development -awareness-building and supply-chain investment consistently emerge as the two levers most frequently cited across superfood categories, forming the basis for the present study's combined consumer-and production-side approach.

Research methodology

The study adopted a descriptive and exploratory research design to systematically describe consumer awareness, purchasing behaviour and demographic characteristics, and to assess production growth and constraint severity.

Data

Primary data were collected from 120 consumers through a structured questionnaire administered via Google Forms, using a convenience sampling method. The instrument covered awareness of health-driven food products, purchase frequency, current and prior-year monthly expenditure, changes in consumption, purchase intention, demographic and socio-economic characteristics, and constraints. Secondary data on millet and mushroom production for 2015-2026 were obtained from published government sources (upag.gov.in) and supplemented with relevant literature.

Analytical tools

Percentage analysis was used to summarise the demographic and socio-economic profile of respondents.

Simple linear regression (𝑌 = 𝑎 + 𝑏𝑋 + 𝑒) was used to examine the relationship between consumer awareness (X) and purchase-related behaviour (Y). Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR = [(Vₙ/V 0 )^(1/n) -1] × 100) was used to measure the annualised growth of millet and mushroom production over the study period. Garrett's Ranking Technique was used to convert respondents' rankings of consumption/marketing constraints into comparable per centposition scores (Per cent position = 100 × (Rᵢⱼ -0.5) ÷ Nⱼ), enabling the constraints to be ordered by mean Garrett score.

Results and discussions

Multiple regression analysis (n = 120) examined the influence of consumer awareness on purchase decision. The results are summarised in Tables 1 and2. Consumer awareness had a positive and highly significant effect on purchase decision (b = 0.573, t = 11.227, p < 0.001). Each one-unit increase in the awareness score was associated with an increase of approximately 0.573 units in the purchase-decision score. The model explained 51.6% of the variation in purchase decision (adjusted R 2 = 51.2%), indicating that awareness is an important but partial determinant -the remaining variation is likely attributable to price, income, taste, product availability and brand trust, none of which were included in this single-variable model. The finding is consistent with Reddy et al. (2025) [1] and Kaur et al. (2025) [2] , both of whom observed strong awareness but an accompanying gap between awareness and consistent purchasing, and it reinforces the case for treating awareness-building as a necessary but not sufficient condition for market growth.

Factor

Demographic profile of consumers

The demographic and socio-economic profile of the 120 respondents is summarised in Table 3. Consumers above 35 years formed the largest single age segment (44.1%), though the 20-35 age band collectively accounted for a similar share (48.4%), suggesting that both established and younger health-conscious consumers represent viable market segments. The sample was male-dominated (70%), and 73.4% of respondents held at least an undergraduate qualification, consistent with Shirur et al. (2015) [3] , who similarly found mushroom consumers to be predominantly educated. Income distribution skewed towards lower and middle brackets, with 61.7% of respondents earning below ₹75,000 per month, indicating that affordability considerations are likely to matter for a majority of the potential consumer base. Respondents were fairly evenly distributed across rural (36.7%), urban (32.5%) and semi-urban (30.8%) areas, indicating that interest in health-driven foods extends beyond urban centres alone. Millet production fluctuated between a low of 137.11 lakh tonnes (2019) and a high of 185.92 lakh tonnes (2025), around a mean of 164.04 lakh tonnes (SD = 13.77, CV = 8.39%), indicating comparatively low year-to-year variability. The regression trend line was positive (b = 0.00595, R 2 = 0.308), and the estimated compound growth rate was 1.38% per annum, significant at the 10% level (t = 2.112, p = 0.068). Mushroom production followed a markedly more volatile, U-shaped path: a relatively high plateau in 2015-2017 (peaking at 4,870 lakh tonnes) was followed by a sharp collapse to 1,340 lakh tonnes in 2018, after which production recovered steadily to 4,270 lakh tonnes by 2026. The mean was 3,159 lakh tonnes with a much higher CV of 38.92%, reflecting this instability. The estimated CAGR was 1.29% per annum; however, the underlying time trend was not statistically significant (t = 0.355, p = 0.732), meaning the positive growth figure should be read primarily as evidence of a strong post-2018 recovery rather than a statistically reliable long-run upward trend. Taken together, both commodities show positive average growth, but the underlying reliability of that growth differs sharply: millet production is growing steadily off a relatively stable base, while mushroom production is recovering strongly but from a highly volatile base. On this evidence, the null hypothesis of no significant growth (H 0 ) can be rejected for millets at the 10% level, while for mushrooms the result is inconclusive on the trend test despite a positive average CAGRunderscoring the practical importance of production stabilisation.

Constraints using health driven food

Garrett's Ranking Technique was used to rank five constraints identified by respondents in the consumption and marketing of healthdriven food products. Results are presented in Table 6. [4] , Biswas et al. (2024) [5] and Avanish et al. (2023) [9] , all of whom identified perishability, storage and transportation as the dominant constraints on the marketing side, and suggests that infrastructural investment (cold-chain, storage, packaging) is likely to yield a larger marginal improvement in market development than awareness campaigns alone, even though the regression results in Section 4.1 confirm that awareness remains an important driver of purchase decisions.

Conclusions and suggestions

This study set out to assess the market potential of superfoods in India, with particular reference to millets and mushrooms, by combining consumer-level survey evidence with production-growth and constraint analysis. Four findings stand out. First, consumer awareness has a strong, statistically significant positive relationship with purchase decisions, explaining just over half of the variation observed, which confirms that awareness-building remains a meaningful lever for market growth even though other unmeasured factors -price, taste, income and availability -evidently also matter. Second, the consumer base for health-driven foods is demographically broad: while skewed towards male, more-educated and older (35+) consumers, meaningful segments exist across younger age groups, all three income brackets and all three residence types, indicating room for differentiated rather than one-size-fits-all marketing. Third, both millet and mushroom production show positive average annual growth (1.38% and 1.29% respectively) over 2015-2026, though millet's growth trend is statistically more reliable, while mushroom production remains considerably more volatile despite its strong recent recovery. Fourth, perishability and poor supply-chain infrastructure are, by a clear margin, the most severe constraints perceived by consumers -ahead of labelling complexity, low awareness and limited variety -indicating that operational and logistical barriers currently outweigh purely informational one

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