Food, though the basic need of human, a highly complex subject to understand. The complexity increases as we move from staple food to value added foods like convenience foods. We wanted to understand fundamentals of convenience foods based on the available literature. We scoped our study in three parts. First, to collate relevant definitions for convenience foods and clarify the common threads, second, understand the classifications of convenience foods and the rationale of such classifications and finally drivers of convenience foods, its evolutions and how they play in developing and developed markets. Scholarly articles in platforms like Google Scholar and Science Direct, industry reports, published data from Government departments (Open Government Data - OGD) and data from non-profit organization like Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) were surveyed to get appropriate understanding of the subject. Last 30 years of literature were surveyed to get proper perspective from a reasonably longer period. We selected 62 articles for in-depth study which discussed definitions, classification and consumption drivers and also cited more frequently by other authors. The critical learning from literature review is that convenience foods have to be always understood within a context, as the meaning, definition and utility of convenience foods change when the context changes. The context is also important while classifying convenience foods. Context also plays major role in the evolution of consumption drivers, its commonality and contrast nature among developed and developing markets. This paper brings the relevant definitions and classifications of convenience foods in one place. It also makes reasonable comparison of consumption drivers between developed and developing markets. The literature review is limited to relevant scholarly articles and reports of past 30 years. Recent research papers which considered COVID-19 impact as one of the factors were excluded from the scope of this study.