India's food and beverage industry has no shortage of companies claiming innovation. What lacks, until recently, is a consistent way to verify those claims before handing out recognition. That's the gap Coherent Market Insights (CMI) was brought in to address as the Official Process Advisor for the Fi India Awards 2026, organized by Informa Markets and set to culminate in a ceremony on August 26, 2026, at Hotel Sahara Star, Mumbai.

The numbers behind this year's process are worth sitting with. CMI's team started with 241 nominations across 16 categories — everything from food safety and plant-based innovation to AI-driven solutions and packaging. Thirty-two of those were incomplete drafts, filtered out immediately. The remaining 209 went through detailed review: category fit, documentation, and — critically — whether the claims being made actually stood up to scrutiny.

This is where the process gets interesting. Rather than rejecting nominations with minor issues, CMI reached out to nominees directly when something was fixable — a missing certificate, an unclear timeline. That clarification loop is why 161 nominations, not fewer, ultimately reached the jury stage.

From there, three independent jury panels took over, each built around a theme: Food safety and sustainability, Ingredients and wellness, and Brand and commercial growth. The panels scored nominations on a 1–10 scale across six parameters, weighted so that 60% reflected hard business metrics — compliance, operational scale, measurable impact — and 40% captured qualitative factors like governance and market perception. That balance mattered: a company can't win purely on brand polish, but it also can't win on operational numbers alone if the qualitative case isn't there.

The result was 47 finalists across 16 categories, drawn from a pool where roughly a third of nominations were either incomplete, unsubstantiated, or filtered out along the way.

For Mr. Raj Shah, CEO & Founder of Coherent Market Insights, who oversaw the methodology, the process itself has become a lens on the industry. "Going through this many nominations, category by category, you start to see where the real movement is happening in this industry — and it's not always where you'd expect," he said. Shah is scheduled to share further insights on the process during a session at the ceremony, from 7:35 to 7:40 PM.

It's worth being clear about where CMI's role ends. It didn't pick winners — that stayed entirely with the independent jury panels. CMI's job was building and governing the funnel: eligibility, evidence, and process integrity, nothing more.

Whether that distinction matters to the companies walking away with trophies on August 26 is an open question. But for an industry increasingly scrutinized on the gap between marketing claims and actual practice, a documented, evidence-based process is arguably as worthy as the winners list itself.

About Fi India Awards
Now in its fourth edition, the Fi India Awards recognizes organizations across India's food and beverage ecosystem, spanning categories from sustainability to digital innovation. The event is part of Informa Markets' Fi India platform.

About Coherent Market Insights
Coherent Market Insights is a global market research and consulting firm working across food and beverage, healthcare, technology, and consumer goods. Its work centers on syndicated research and custom consulting grounded in data — the same discipline it applied in building and governing the evaluation process for the Fi India Awards 2026.

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