India’s Impulse Festive Shopper: How Last-Minute Buying Redefined Celebrations In 2025

India’s festive season has always been about abundance of food, colour, people, and emotion. But in 2025, how that abundance is accessed has quietly, decisively changed. The modern Indian festive shopper is no longer planning weeks in advance, hoarding supplies, or making multiple market runs. Instead, they are leaning into speed, spontaneity, and immediacy reshaping festive consumption into something more impulse-driven, experience-led, and deeply integrated with daily life.

Quick commerce sits at the centre of this shift. Devendra Meel, Chief Business Officer, Zepto, believes festive demand in 2025 surged sharply. “During Diwali, daily orders crossed two million,” Meel notes, highlighting how quick commerce has become a critical enabler of festive shopping,

not just for essentials, but for gourmet foods, mithai, and gifting. The implication is clear: festivals are no longer stocked for; they’re activated in real time.

What’s particularly telling is that this behaviour isn’t limited to convenience-driven categories. Meel points out that during Onam, demand rose for culturally specific products like Kasavu sarees and mundus. This signals a deeper evolution, quick commerce is no longer merely transactional. By delivering attire, ritual items, and region-specific products at speed, platforms are embedding themselves into the cultural fabric of celebrations. Festivals are becoming less about preparation logistics and more about presence.

That presence, however, is increasingly centred around food. For Rajeev Jain, Senior Vice President, Corporate Marketing, DS Group, this shift reflects something more fundamental about Indian social behaviour. “At the heart of every Indian festival lies togetherness,” Jain explains, noting that shared meals remain the most enduring ritual across regions and religions. In 2025, consumers are gravitating towards practical yet premium consumables, confectionery, snacks, beverages, and spices because they are immediately usable, deeply shareable, and culturally resonant.

Unlike decorative gifts or one-time-use objects, food integrates seamlessly into hosting. It creates what Jain calls an “instant sensory experience,” aligning perfectly with India’s long-standing sharing culture. This explains why edible indulgence has overtaken material gifting: it doesn’t sit on a shelf, demand storage, or create post-festival clutter. It disappears—but leaves behind memory.

Urban realities are accelerating this preference. Smaller homes, minimalist lifestyles, and rising awareness around clutter have made bulky, occasional-use gifts impractical. At the same time, digital-first discovery and rapid delivery have recalibrated expectations. Consumers are now conditioned to value immediacy, not just speed, but relevance at the exact moment of need.

Jain frames this as the rise of “perishable luxury”: products that feel premium, indulgent, and celebratory, yet leave no physical baggage behind. In this context, ready-to-consume offerings have become the new celebration-ready standard. Hosting no longer requires elaborate preparation or advance planning; it’s defined by convenience, quality, and social ease.

This evolution has profound implications. Festive hosting, once labour-intensive and time-consuming, is now more fluid and inclusive. Last-minute gatherings no longer feel compromised. A sudden Diwali dinner, an unplanned festive visit, or an impromptu family get-together can still feel elevated because the ecosystem now supports it.

What we’re witnessing in 2025 isn’t the erosion of tradition, but its reformatting. Rituals remain intact; what’s changed is the friction around them. Technology hasn’t replaced celebration, it has compressed the distance between intention and execution.

India’s impulse festive shopper isn’t careless or unthinking. They’re responsive, experience-focused, and emotionally efficient. They value moments over objects, immediacy over excess, and shared consumption over symbolic gifting. In a country where festivals are as much about people as they are about products, this shift feels not just modern but inevitable.

As festivals continue to become more spontaneous and less scripted, one thing is certain: the future of celebration belongs to those who can deliver joy exactly when it’s needed, hot, fresh, relevant, and ready to be shared.