Christmas Vs New Year’s Eve 2025: Redefined Value Creation Across India’s On-Demand Economy

The final week of the year has increasingly become a stress test for India’s on-demand platforms. And in 2025, the contrast between Christmas impact on on-demand sales for Food delivery and Quick Commerce vs New Year’s Eve’s impact offered a clear lesson: while both drive engagement, New Year’s Eve fundamentally changes the quality of demand.

Across Food Delivery and Quick Commerce, 31st December emerged as the single most important day of the year, not just for scale, but for monetisation leverage.

Let’s break it down…

Food Delivery: When Demand, Premiumisation, and Monetisation Align

New Year’s Eve continues to anchor the food delivery calendar; 2025 reinforced why. Orders across the two-player market crossed ~71 lakh, representing a ~1.6x uplift versus BAU levels (Apr–Sep’25). But unlike most festive spikes, the surge was not just about throughput.

Gross Order Value scaled to ~1.9x of BAU, with YoY GOV growth (~20%) meaningfully outpacing YoY order growth (~12%). This divergence is critical: it signals an event where platforms are not merely absorbing demand, but actively capturing higher value per transaction.

The composition of demand shifted materially. AOV expanded to ~1.2x of BAU, driven by:

• Group and party-led ordering

• Higher spend on premium mains, curated combos, desserts, and beverages

• A clear consumer willingness to trade up for the occasion

Structurally, this differentiates New Year’s Eve from other festive days. While Christmas delivered a healthy uplift (~1.2x orders; ~1.3x GOV) that broadly tracked recent growth trends, New Year’s Eve stands out as the category’s most accretive event: combining scale, premiumisation, and monetisation in a way few days can.

Quick Commerce: From Festive Utility to Celebration Enabler

Quick Commerce showed an equally telling shift but across a different behavioural arc.

On New Year’s Eve, order volumes scaled to ~1.4–1.5x of BAU (Sep–Nov’25), accompanied by a ~1.15x expansion in AOV, driving GMV to ~1.6x of BAU. Unlike Christmas, demand here was not purely frequency-led. Consumers increasingly used Quick Commerce for larger, occasion-centric shopping missions, relying on it to enable celebrations rather than just solve last-minute needs. This demand was actively enabled by occasion-led assortments and clearer in-app discovery.

Platforms surfaced party-ready categories through festive landing sections such as snacks for gatherings, beverages and mixers, and party essentials, making it easier for users to build complete baskets in one go. Dedicated festive tiles and curated collections helped shorten decision time and increased item add-ons per order.

In parallel, platforms leaned on simple value-led offers that encouraged users to add more items per order, for example, discounts on multiple packs, combo pricing across snacks and beverages, or offers triggered beyond a minimum basket size. Premium beverages, imported snacks, and celebration-focused FMCG items saw strong traction, supporting the basket expansion observed on the day.

This marks a clear evolution from Christmas Day, where Quick Commerce GMV scaled to ~1.3x of BAU, driven almost entirely by higher order volumes, with basket sizes remaining broadly flat. Christmas reinforced Quick Commerce’s role as a utility-led, high-frequency channel, focused on urgency and convenience.

New Year’s Eve, however, elevated the channel into a full-fledged celebration enabler, blending higher throughput with meaningful basket expansion.

The Bigger Signal: A Two-Phase Festive Playbook Is Emerging

Viewed together, the year-end data reveals a clear, repeatable pattern across India’s on-demand economy:

• Christmas sustains engagement and reinforces habitual usage: volume-led, predictable, and stabilising.

• New Year’s Eve unlocks premium, intent-driven demand: with consumers willing to spend more, order differently, and prioritise experience over price sensitivity.

For Food Delivery, this means New Year’s Eve remains the strongest monetisation moment of the year.
For Quick Commerce, it signals a transition—from being a convenience utility to becoming an integral part of celebration-led consumption.

What This Means Going Forward

Festive performance is no longer just about peak management. It is increasingly about demand quality, pricing power, and occasion-led design.

Platforms that distinctly design for:

• Volume stability on habit-led days, and

• Premium, high-intent behaviour on celebration-led moments,will extract disproportionate value from the calendar.

Traditional and ‘Created’ festivals, of which India celebrates over 300 around the year, mobilise millions of households, MSMEs, artisans, gig workers, and brands in cyclical bursts of economic activity. Spanning consumption peaks, local commerce, credit flow, philanthropy, and cultural continuity, India’s festive rhythm has evolved into a structural economic force.

In our recent report, “Culture-powered Commerce: Impact of Festivals on the Indian Economy”, combines cultural insight with data-driven analysis to decode India’s festival economy and the lessons it offers for governance, business strategy, and inclusive development.

Equip your 2026 planning with culturally-timed demand data; with ‘Valentine’s week’  the next big one in sight. Connect with our experts for a 1:1 consultation for a strategic guidance.