PurposeRetailing in India is an unchartered territory. Food and grocery is the most promising area for setting up retail business in India. An understanding of shopper retail format choice behaviour will enable retailers to segment their market and target specific consumer groups with strategies premeditated to meet their retail needs. The purpose of this paper is to make a detailed study on the effect of shoppers' demographic, geographic and psychographic dimensions in terms of format choice behaviour in the fast growing Indian food and grocery retailing.Design/methodology/approachDescriptive research design is adopted applying mall intercept survey method using structured questionnaire for data collection. Both descriptive (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistical tools like χ2, factor analysis and multivariate analysis are used to analyse the data collected from 1,040 food and grocery retail customers from upgraded neighbourhood kirana stores, convenience stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets in conjoint cities of Secunderabad and Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh in India.FindingsThe findings suggest that shoppers' age, gender, occupation, education, monthly household income, family size and distance travelled to store have significant association with retail format choice decisions. The choice decisions are also varied among shoppers' demographic attributes. The findings from shoppers' psychographic dimensions like values, lifestyle factors and shopping orientations resulted in segmentation of food and grocery retail consumers into hedonic, utilitarian, autonomous, conventional and socialization type.Practical implicationsThe study has practical implications for food and grocery retailers for better understanding the shopper behaviour in the context of changing consumer demographic and psychographic characteristics in an emerging Indian retail market. The findings may help the retailers to segment and target the food and grocery retail consumers and, as a consequence, to undertake more effective retail marketing strategies for competitive advantage.Originality/valueGiven the absence of published academic literature and empirical findings relating to store format choice behaviour in food and grocery retailing in India, this study may serve as a departure point for future studies in this area of concern. The research is also relevant to retail marketers in terms of format development and reorientation of marketing strategies in the fastest growing Indian retail market.