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Most Indian businesses in Australia plan their marketing about ten days before a festival. The Canva post goes up on Diwali morning, the WhatsApp broadcast goes out the night before, and the gift boxes that should have sold at full margin in week one get discounted in week three.
The businesses that do well treat the year as a fixed set of known selling windows and work backwards from each one. Nothing here is a surprise. Diwali is not going to sneak up on anyone.
Below is the calendar we build for our grocery, restaurant and food manufacturing clients across Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland.
How to use this calendar
Three phases per major festival, and the dates below are the festival, not the campaign start.
Four weeks out – awareness. Recipe content, festival explainer posts, stock arrival announcements. No hard selling. You are getting into the feed before the noise.
Two weeks out – offers. Hampers, combos, bulk pricing, pre-order forms. This is when corporate and family gifting decisions get made.
Final five days – urgency. Stock levels, cut-off dates, last delivery slots, extended trading hours.
Lunar festival dates shift each year. Confirm the exact date against a panchang before locking your calendar, especially for Holi, Diwali, Eid and Ganesh Chaturthi.
The year, month by month
January – new year, harvest, and a quiet reset
Lohri and Makar Sankranti and Pongal fall in the middle of the month, and Republic Day and Australia Day both land on 26 January.
Sesame, jaggery, sugarcane and til products move well. Pongal drives strong demand in the Tamil community for rice, ghee and traditional cookware.
This is also the quietest retail month in Australia after the December run, which makes it the right time to fix your Google Business Profile, refresh your product photography and build the next quarter’s content bank.
February – small month, good margin
Valentine’s Day works better for Indian sweet shops and dessert cafés than most owners expect. Rose-flavoured mithai, gift boxes, couple combos.
Maha Shivaratri falls in February or early March depending on the year. Fasting foods sell: sabudana, singhare ka atta, fruit, rajgira.
March – Holi, and the first real spike
Holi is the year’s most photogenic festival and the easiest to build video content around. Colours, gujiya, thandai, papdi, snacks.
Community Holi events run across Melbourne and Sydney through March. Sponsoring or supplying one of these puts your brand in front of thousands of exactly the right households, and the user-generated content that comes back is worth more than the sponsorship fee.
Ugadi and Gudi Padwa arrive late March or early April. Ramadan usually begins in this window too, which starts a month of very different buying behaviour: dates, dry fruits, sheer khurma ingredients, and evening trading hours that suddenly matter.
April – new year, several times over
Baisakhi on 13 or 14 April, Tamil Puthandu, Bengali Poila Boishakh, Vishu. Eid al-Fitr closes Ramadan.
Four distinct communities celebrating new year within two weeks. Generic “Happy New Year” content wastes the opportunity. Segment your audience and speak to each properly, in the right language where you can.
May – Mother’s Day and steady trade
Australian Mother’s Day falls on the second Sunday of May. Sweet boxes, dining offers, gift hampers.
Akshaya Tritiya is considered auspicious for buying gold and starting new ventures. Relevant for jewellers, and worth a mention for anyone selling anything considered a shubh purchase.
June – end of financial year
The most underused month in the Indian business calendar in Australia.
EOFY on 30 June matters enormously if you sell wholesale, supply restaurants or run any B2B line. Restaurants are clearing budgets, distributors are moving stock and businesses are looking for deductible purchases. Bulk deals, equipment, packaging, ingredient contracts.
Eid al-Adha usually falls in this window. Winter also shifts consumer demand toward heavier cooking: ghee, dry fruits, hot beverages, ready-to-heat meals.
July – the planning month
Guru Purnima, and the start of the school term. Trade is slow and cold in most of Australia.
Use it. This is when we build our clients’ Diwali campaigns, because by September there is no time left to think. Photography, hamper design, packaging, pre-order systems, festival landing pages. All of it should be finished before August ends.
August – Independence Day and the run-up
Indian Independence Day on 15 August, Raksha Bandhan, Janmashtami. Onam begins in late August or early September.
Rakhi is a genuine sales event, not just a greeting post. Rakhi and sweets combos, and international shipping enquiries from families sending to India.
Onam is a significant selling window in Melbourne and Sydney. Sadya ingredients, banana leaves, Kerala-specific products, payasam kits.
September – Ganesh Chaturthi, and Diwali groundwork
Ganesh Chaturthi drives modak, puja items, decorations and idols. Community pandals across Melbourne and Sydney are worth partnering with.
Australian Father’s Day is the first Sunday of September.
Navratri often begins in late September. When it does, your Diwali season has effectively started. Corporate gifting enquiries should already be going out.
October – the biggest month of the year
Navratri, Durga Puja, Dussehra, Karwa Chauth, and in 2026 the Diwali build-up runs through October into early November.
Nine nights of fasting food demand, then Durga Puja for the Bengali community with its own distinct food culture, then the full Diwali retail season.
If you only run one properly planned campaign all year, it is this one. Dry fruits, gift hampers, sweets, diyas, rangoli, puja samagri, new clothes, and bulk corporate orders.
Extend your trading hours and tell people you have. Half the lost revenue in Diwali week is customers assuming you shut at six.
November – Diwali, Melbourne Cup, Black Friday
Diwali falls in early November in 2026, with Bhai Dooj following. Confirm the exact date before you plan around it.
Melbourne Cup Day on the first Tuesday of November brings a public holiday in Victoria and unusual foot traffic patterns. Black Friday now lands hard in Australia, and Indian grocers who run a genuine Black Friday offer on bulk staples do surprisingly well with non-Indian customers.
Post-Diwali is not dead. Wedding season begins. Catering enquiries, bulk orders, sweet trays.
December – Christmas and the shipping window
Christmas and Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve. Restaurants run at capacity, groceries see holiday cooking demand and the international shipping cut-off for parcels to India is earlier than most customers realise. Announce it twice.
Summer in Australia shifts demand to cold drinks, kulfi, falooda, lassi, mango products.
The one-page version
| Season | Runs | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| Diwali season | Navratri to Bhai Dooj, Sep–Nov | Highest |
| Holi | March | High |
| Christmas and New Year | December | High |
| EOFY and B2B | June | High for wholesale |
| Ramadan and Eid | Varies, Mar–Apr | High in Muslim-majority areas |
| Raksha Bandhan | August | Medium |
| Ganesh Chaturthi | Aug–Sep | Medium, city dependent |
| Onam | Aug–Sep | High in Malayali areas |
| Pongal and Sankranti | January | Medium |
| Wedding season | Nov–Feb | Medium, steady |
What actually goes wrong
Same post, every festival, different colour. Your audience sees hundreds of these. A photo of your actual product, shot in your actual shop, outperforms a template with a diya on it every single time.
No lead time on gifting. Corporate Diwali orders get decided in September. If your pre-order form goes live in the last week of October, those orders went somewhere else.
Ignoring the Australian half of the calendar. EOFY, Black Friday and Melbourne Cup affect your trade whether you plan for them or not.
Treating every community as one audience. A Malayali family and a Punjabi family in the same suburb are shopping for completely different things in September. Segment your list.
Stopping the day after. Diwali week traffic is the largest new-customer window you get all year. Capture those numbers, add them to your database, and give them a reason to come back in December.
Ready to Get Next Season Handled Properly?
Build the calendar in July. Book the photography in August. Then spend October selling instead of scrambling.
We plan and run this calendar end to end for grocers, restaurants and food brands across Australia and New Zealand.
Get in touch today for a free strategy consultation. Contact us here.