Modern appliances are becoming the new custodians of India’s culinary traditions
A working professional in Bengaluru can turn out idli batter in under ten minutes on a machine that sits on her kitchen shelf, a process that took her grandmother the better part of the morning on a stone grinder. The batter is the same. The dish is the same. But somewhere between the grandmother and the granddaughter, the making of it quietly changed hands, from a person to a machine.That gap sits at the centre of a real question facing India’s appliance industry: is technology replacing tradition, or is it the only thing keeping it alive?The pressure on traditional Indian cooking has little to do with taste and everything to do with time. Nuclear families, dual incomes and shrinking cooking windows have replaced the joint households and unhurried mornings that once carried culinary knowledge forward. When that structure disappeared, it wasn’t the food that went with it. It was the teaching.Yet the appetite hasn’t faded. Google’s 2025 year-end data placed idli as the single most-searched recipe in the country, ahead of festive dishes like modak and thekua. Interest in traditional food is intensifying, not fading, particularly among Gen-Z home cooks.This is where appliances stop being tools of convenience and start doing something larger: making room for cooking traditions inside lives that no longer have time for elaborate processes. Induction cooktops now ship with presets tuned to Indian techniques—Croma Private Label’s range includes one-touch settings for idli, curry, and rice. Even the air fryer, often dismissed as a Western import, often gets used to make samosas, pakoras and mathris.The shift runs wider than appliances. FMCG firms are reworking pantry staples for faster routines without diluting their traditional image. For instance, processing infrastructure and kitchen technology that make millets as easy to cook as rice has aided the millet revival. Tradition survives when someone builds the infrastructure that lets it stay part of everyday life.The generation now reaching for modern kitchen tools isn’t walking away from its food. It is grinding, steaming and fermenting the same dishes its grandparents did, just on machines its grandparents never had. The recipe hasn’t been abandoned. Only the hands doing the work have changed.But if appliances are to become genuine custodians, the next phase must get more regional. Moving from a generic “Indian mode” to preset libraries that know a Kerala sambar from a Punjabi dal tadka can’t be a luxury. Standardisation risks flattening the very regional variety it claims to protect. A hundred regional kitchens shouldn’t collapse into one setting.Success for this industry won’t be measured in smarter machines. It will be measured in how many traditional dishes still reach our everyday tables because of them and whether a grandmother’s recipes are still being cooked three generations from now, through them.By Shibashish Roy, chief executive officer & managing director, Infiniti Retail Ltd.
