Our love for Pani Puri with or without lock down | Gauss Machine

abhijit maheswari
2 min readSep 29, 2020

The roads were deserted. One left home only when it was absolutely unavoidable. This was the scene from March end that continued for few more weeks. Confined in, one would expect our eating or taste bud to reflect this reality. And it did for the most but Pani Puri. The restrictions and the added concern of contact-food, made the walk to the corner pani-puri shop little tricky and out of reach for most. What was feasible ? Having it at the comfort of our home. And so we did.

The data tells the story.

Interest in panipuri and its masala both grew 5x and 3x from its 2 years average. Graph below shows the trend line for ‘pani puri’ and ‘pani puri in Masala’. The first one is overall interest in pani puri and the second shows pani puri interest under masala category.

Pani Puri Trends.

Lets look at the 2020 growth

The pani puri masala saw the biggest jump under masala flavor. Other masala that grew were pav bhaji, biryani, sambar, tandoor, idli, prawn respectively.

Masala Flavors (% change in interests) 2020 vs 2019.

Takeaways:

  1. People have been eating pani puri at home since the lockdown. They have been home ordering the masala to make it at home. Pani Puri is also called Golgappe, Puchka in some parts of India.
  2. Interest in pani puri masala grew by more than 500% (y-y) in 2020.
  3. As proportion of different masala flavors, pani puri masala grew to be 15.17 % of all masala interest, second only to egg masala.
  4. One masala and spice brand (remains unnamed here) who had a product around pani puri masala for sometime has seen significant jump in interests.
  5. This could be short-lived. One would expect the incentive to buy pani puri masala to come down once normalization returns and the corner pani puri wala opens up. But it is also utterly possible that people’s way of eating pani puri has changed for good. We will know soon.

But what does it tells us about us ? Apart from,our love for pani puri (momo is vying for top slot in the evening snack. For that, we will have to look at interest in chutney categories. You will be surprised). Flavors can lift the spirit. For some its chocolate, for others it is pani puri.

Data source : Google

This story also appears here

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abhijit maheswari

I like to decipher patterns whether it’s from robot sensor or digital footprints left by humans. AI, Robotics, Mathematics & Poetry interests me