The Journey of SaaS to SaaM
by Roshan Patil
April 09, 2026 | 05 min read
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This year, the World Health Organisation marked World Health Day under the theme “Together for Health. Stand with Science.” The campaign calls for evidence-based approaches to health across humans, animals, and the environment a framework WHO describes as One Health. Anchoring the observance were two events: an International One Health Summit in France and the inaugural Global Forum of WHO Collaborating Centres, which brought together nearly 800 scientific institutions from over 80 countries. The message is straightforward: The decisions that shape public health should be grounded in data, not assumption.
Wondering how health and SaaS landed in the same place? and what’s the new term “SaaM”. This might help: Saas (Snacks as a Snack) & SaaM (Snacks as a Meal).
Already sorry for my weird sense of humour 🙂
That framing is a useful lens for something happening in everyday life across India, something that rarely makes it into health policy conversations but plays out millions of times a day in offices, commutes, and homes: The gradual replacement of structured meals with snacks.
A Habit That Has Already Changed
Roughly 18% of Indians now substitute snacks for at least one full meal regularly. That is not a projected figure or a trend to watch, it is the present reality for a significant share of the population. The reasons are not hard to find. Cities are busier, commutes are longer, workdays stretch unpredictably, and the infrastructure for a proper sit-down meal is often simply not there. A packet of biscuits at a desk or a protein bar on a metro platform fills the gap.
What makes this worth examining on World Health Day is not the snacking itself but what it means nutritionally. A meal has a certain expectation built into it. It is supposed to be balanced, filling, and sustaining. A snack carries no such expectation, at least not historically. When one replaces the other, the nutritional outcome depends entirely on what kind of snack is into the replacement.
Health Consciousness Is Rising, But So Is the Risk
Urban India has become noticeably more health-aware. Around 84% of urban Indians exercise regularly, a figure that would have seemed improbable two decades ago. More people are reading labels, asking about ingredients, and looking for snacks that offer something beyond calories. Formats that are high in protein or fibre are growing about 20% faster than conventional snack options.
Consumer intent surveys point in the same direction. Nearly half of Indians plan to eat more high-fibre foods, and over one third plan to increase their intake of plant-based proteins. More than half of snack buyers say they actively prefer products without preservatives.
This is encouraging. But intent and actual consumption do not always line up. The most widely consumed snacks in India are still fried, salty, and calorie-dense. When those are the snacks replacing meals, because they are cheaper, more available, or simply more familiar. The nutritional equation worsens, not improves. A population exercising more while eating worse is not moving in a coherent direction.
What the Food Industry Is Doing About It
There is genuine innovation happening. Food companies have introduced high-protein versions of everyday staples: dosa mixes, chapati flour, biscuits, and chips that are designed to carry more nutritional weight than their conventional equivalents. Multigrain bars and roasted nut mixes are on shelves in modern retail across metro cities. Nutritionists have described these products as offering meaningful improvements over traditional fried snacks in terms of actual dietary contribution.
At the research level, Indian food scientists have developed a rice variety with three times the normal protein content and a lower glycaemic profile aimed at addressing hidden hunger and reducing diabetes risk without requiring people to change what they eat. Precision fermentation, which uses micro-organisms to produce proteins and fats, is advancing globally and will eventually reach Indian consumers.
These developments are real. The question is whether they reach the right people at the right time and at a price point that works for more than just urban, upper-income buyers.
The Access Problem
A nutritious snack is only meaningful if people can actually get it. This is where the picture gets complicated. Premium and functional snack segments are growing at around 13% a year, but they remain concentrated in modern retail supermarkets, organised chains, and e-commerce which serves a relatively small share of the total population.
The majority of India shops at kiranas and small neighbourhood stores. These outlets stock what sells in volume, what has a long shelf life, and what is priced accessibly. That calculus tends to favour established, indulgent formats over newer health-oriented ones. If healthier snacks are not making it into these channels, the meal-replacement shift happening at the mass market level is still being driven by the old, less nutritious options.
Affordability compounds the problem. A multigrain protein bar costs several times more than a packet of glucose biscuits. For a large share of the population, the healthier choice is not really a choice at all.
What This Means in Practice
The picture is not pessimistic. It is mixed, which is a more useful way to look at it. India has the consumer intent, the food science, and the industry activity to make snacking a genuinely positive health intervention. The gap is largely in execution: getting the right products into the right outlets, at prices that work, with enough shelf presence that they become habitual choices rather than occasional ones.
There is also a role for honest communication. A snack marketed as “high protein” can mean very different things depending on how the numbers are presented. As snacks increasingly function as meals, the standards applied to how nutritional claims are made and verified probably need to catch up with how people are actually eating.
Standing with science, as this year’s World Health Day theme asks, would mean applying the same rigour to snack nutrition that we apply to other areas of public health, not as a regulatory exercise, but as a practical commitment to what the data shows people are actually consuming.
From Bizom
At Bizom, we work across India’s retail network, from large modern trade chains to individual kiranas in smaller towns. The snacking shift described in this piece is not abstract to us; it shows up in what gets ordered, what gets restocked, and what goes out of stock and stays that way.
One thing the data makes clear is that availability gaps are real. A healthier snack format might be launching and gaining traction in urban outlets while being entirely absent from the channels that serve most of the country. That gap is not always visible from the top of a supply chain, but it has a direct effect on what people eat.
We think about this not just as a logistics problem but as something worth paying attention to for its own sake. If the food being put in front of people, at the moments when they are replacing a meal, is not adequate nutritionally, that is a problem that distribution can either worsen or help address. We would rather it be the latter.
