Witnessing solid growth

India is experiencing a surge in can packaging sales and usage. Raghavendra Verma reports from New Delhi.

While India’s metal can industry expands rapidly in the country’s beverage market, Indian government support for growing the food processing industry is expanding growth opportunities in this country of 1.4 billion people, with a GDP of US$4.19 trillion (IMF figures).

“The can industry is going to benefit from the Indian government’s incentives to the food processing industry where seasonal variations in prices are huge,” Ajay Agarwal, chairman and managing director of Hyderabad-based AJ Packaging, told CanTech International. At present, food processing is largely a cottage industry in India, but there is going to be a high degree of automation in future, he said – with packaging manufacturers and processors being the key beneficiaries.

Cans account for 25% of beer sales in India. Image: Raghavendra Verma

Indeed, 41 mega food parks, 394 cold chain projects, 75 agro-processing clusters projects and 536 food processing units are currently supported by government grants and subsidies worth INR61.99 billion ($729 million) under the central government’s Pradham Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana, a comprehensive scheme boosting India’s food processing sector. A government statement issued in March 2025 said: “India is poised to emerge as a global leader in the food processing sector, with an impressive growth trajectory,” adding that the country is already a major producer of fruits, vegetables, grain, rice, tea, milk and livestock products.

All these lines could be canned, providing effective preservation for food in a country where cold chains are often weak and spoilage can be significant. Indeed, India’s metal can industry is growing at an annual rate of five per cent, according to Sanjay Bhatia, president of the Metal Container Manufacturers Association of India, and managing director of New Delhi-based Hindustan Tin Works, with juices, baby food, milk powder, vegetable oil, sweets, mushrooms and dates being particularly important canned products.

“A lot of investment is happening in the industry to increase capacity, improve quality and adopt the latest technology,” he told CanTech.

According to a market report, India Beverage Cans Market Size & Outlook, 2023-2030, published by US-based Horizon Grand View Research, with annual sales of $304.3 million in 2023, India’s beverage cans segment is expected to grow with a compound annual growth rate of 8.3 per cent until 2030. “In terms of revenue, India accounted for 0.8 per cent of the global beverage cans market in 2023,” it said, however, “India is the fastest growing regional market in Asia Pacific.”

The report added that increasing urbanisation, rising disposable income levels, growing e-commerce and retail chains in India are expected to increase the demand for beverage cans.

Major can manufacturers are taking notice and in January, the Kraków, Poland-based Canpack Group announced an investment of $150 million for an aluminium beverage can manufacturing facility in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, which will be its third facility after Aurangabad (Maharashtra) and Nuh (Haryana).

Earlier in December 2024, Colorado, US-based Ball Corporation entered into a partnership with Indian consumer goods company, Dabur India, to launch a variant of the latter’s juice brand, Réal, in two-piece aluminium cans: “Cans as a packaging substrate is expected at grow at a CAGR of 12 per cent from 2023 to 2028 in the juice-based category,” said a statement from Ball, which operates two beverages can plants in Taloja (Maharashtra) and Sri City (Andhra Pradesh), and an aerosol packaging plant in Sanand (Gujarat).

Dabur, which has used Tetra packing in the past, is adopting metal cans as they can withstand rough handling, minimising the risk of damage, leaks and spoilage during transportation and storage, said Monisha Prasher, marketing head, beverages at Dabur India. “Their ability to prevent contamination and spoilage helps extend the shelf life of products, reducing food waste and enhancing consumer convenience,” she commented. “Also they support a wide range of design and printing options, allowing brands to create visually appealing packaging that stands out on shelves and reinforces brand identity.”

Another major can manufacturer, Crown Holdings, along with its Indian subsidiary Signode, operates manufacturing facilities at five places in India –Rudraram (Telangana), Silvassa (Dadra & Nagar Haveli), Rudrapur (Uttarakhand), Bengaluru (Karnataka) and Dahej (Gujarat).

Alcohol is the largest segment in India’s canned beverages market with a revenue share of 46.89 per cent in 2023, said the Horizon market report, largely made of beer, with Indian beer manufacturers endorsing the packaging’s utility.

According to Vinod Giri, director general of Brewers Association of India, currently cans account for 25 per cent of beer sales in the country. In several states, including the country’s most populous one, Uttar Pradesh, cans have become the pre-eminent form of beer packaging. “No possibility of counterfeiting, easy transportation, quality maintenance through leak-proof sealing, protection from sunlight and sustainable recycling options are the reasons why cans are a good option in a country like India,” he said.

Real Bites product. Image: Dabur India

On the industrial scale with 15kg tin cans, edible oil manufacturers are the biggest customers, said Kajal Debnath, chief regulatory officer, DFM Foods
in Noida (Uttar Pradesh). “Where you have an edible oil factory, you will find a tin can maker nearby,” he commented. “Some oil companies even have the can making facilities within their factories.”

Among Indian exports in metal containers, mango pulp, milk desserts and ready-to-eat dishes are key food items, largely going to Europe and Middle Eastern countries, said Bhatia. “Some Indian metal can makers also export individual components to the food manufacturers who have can making lines abroad,” he said.

Can users who have limited storage space often order flattened cans, said Bhatia. “They have re-forming lines in their factories and make eight to ten thousand cans every day.”

That said, there are major challenges faced by the Indian metal container industry. One is the limitation of just two certified suppliers of food grade steel – Tata Steel and Jindal Stainless, said Bhatia. “We are restricted to sourcing our raw material requirement from them,” he said, adding that these companies charge more in comparison to the prices in other countries.

Furthermore, the industry has intense competition from the widespread use of plastic packaging. According to Sunil Nair, managing director of Food Service Network, a Mumbai-based food supply and distribution company, there have been discussions in the board meetings to switch to metal packaging on sustainability grounds but these have not always been successful: “Metal cans are not only 15 to 18 per cent costlier but there were also issues of availability and timely supplies,” Nair told CanTech, “For 200-gram steel containers, for instance, we could find very few manufacturers, while there are so many for plastic.”

The situation in retail food packaging is the same, as found by CanTech during a visit to a large neighbourhood shop in New Delhi selling more than 1,000 packaged food items. The only products available in metal cans were Nestlé’s condensed milk, Del Monte’s baked beans, sliced pineapple and mushrooms, along with two varieties of traditional milk sweets from Haldiram and Bikano.

The shop’s refrigerated section did include cans from several brands of aerated beverages and a few milk-based drinks. Alcoholic drinks in India are sold only in standalone licenced shops away from the neighbourhood markets.

Meanwhile, the industry is also having to keep on top of new technical regulations. These include new standards for three-piece round open-top metal cans used in the food and beverage industry IS 18427:2024, which replaced the old standards in July 2024, and will be enforced by the Bureau of Indian Standards.

Among canned non-food items, according to Bhatia, paint is the biggest segment followed by aerosol cans for mosquito repellent and room fresheners. Indian brands prefer the printing of labels directly on the metal cans during the manufacturing process and only those packing several products in small quantities use plastic or paper labels, he said.

High-quality printing is of utmost importance on cans used for gifting packs. Chennai-based Nikita Containers, which specialises in this segment, uses machines from UK-based metal packaging specialist Crabtree, and inks from the US-based Valspar, Germany based Huber Group and Japan-based company DIC, said Ramakrishnan Lakshmanan, Nikita Containers director: “We have more than 170 shapes [of containers] with a capacity ranging from five grams to five kilograms,” he told CanTech.

Gifting pack containers are mainly used for sweets, confectionery, tea and coffee, while the gauge of their tinplate ranges from 0.16mm to 0.25mm, said Lakshmanan.

As for recycling, India’s metal packaging sector interacts with informal service providers – the poorer localities of every town and city in India have scrap dealers relying on numerous groups of ragpickers, mostly children surviving at the margins of the society. Metal cans are the first to be picked up by these informal processors and then sold through the chain of scrap metal suppliers.

These enable aluminium cans to reach can manufacturers as per a 2022 study ‘Sustainable Beverage Packaging Options in India,’ by New Delhi-based The Energy and Resource Institute: “The [aluminium can] sheet-making process uses both primary and secondary aluminium with average shares of 24 percent and 76 percent, respectively specific for Ball India supply chain,” it wrote. Sources of secondary aluminium are plant scrap, used beverage cans and aluminium from other industries, it added.