How Convenience is Driving the Biz at Restaurants

What do I do? How do I optimise business? and how do I get the best profits? Are few questions that has always worried the entrepreneurs entering any business. Food Business which has always been treated as retail’s poor cousin has now captured retail in every way.

Talking about these days where everything is convenience driven; food business is not away from it. Today, top performing malls dedicate more than 75 per cent of their spaces renting out to some of the amazing concepts in restaurant and food space. There is a lot of innovation happening with cuisine, home cooking’s where people are playing with ingredients and flavours and are attracted to convenience in every way possible.  “Talking about these days where convenience has become centre piece of everything what we do and food is something we can’t miss of course. In last three years we have experienced that it was the men who used to go out to buy meat outside.  They were the one who were making decisions on what to eat and other lifestyle decisions,” shares Deepanshu Manchanda, CEO & Co-Founder, ZappFresh.

Restaurants should not limit their brand strategy to one point rather they should keep experimenting with what comes handy.  According to the experts it’s the convenience that drives customer these days and no brand should miss this and try harnessing more on it. “We have currently 15 stores in all the malls in Mumbai. The plus point that we have is that in the local region we have that recall value. Now we are coming with convenient product which the customers can carry while travelling which would have a higher shelf life. It will be dry powder and you can add just water with the same content and nutrients of a juice,” adds Hemang Bhatt who runs Has Juice Bars in Mumbai.

Building on Success

Though there is no thumb rule whether a restaurant can retail.  It starts with the concept which has to be scalable. It has to be the menu, the flavours that the brand pack in the menu, the pricing and the position and the portion size, coming up winning combinations that gives him a scalable business model.  “Whatever I am investing I am getting the return in three and half and four years time then it is a scalable model,” points Unnat Varma, MD, Pizza Hut India Subcontinent for whom the single recipe has worked in scaling the Pizza Hut brand in different parts of the country.

It has worked same for Shikha Nath, Brand Head, Copper Chimney and Bombay Brasserie who has expanded her business to global land, “We study the demography, all the kind of factors that drive the business in international market. Put system and processes in place,” adds Nath who believes that the younger generation coming in the business are more organised and have created a new identity for Indian cuisine globally.

Though, there is lots of freshness happening in the industry brand tie ups and partnerships as a new and fresh concept is a good idea to grow further.  “In any biz to be successful it is very important to have your house in place. You need to get what is the target audience, what is the market need, what is the scalability, what is the investment you are putting in and what is the ROI and how many years you will get this,” shares Gautam Chaudhry, Director, Demiurgic Hospitality.