Vada pav adventures

Mihir Shah loves his food and makes no bones about it. He’s picky about what he eats: toast and eggs for breakfast, a vegetarian lunch, a 4 pm snack and then dinner. The late afternoon bite, says the 32-year-old marketing executive, is the meal he looks forward to the most. For two decades, Shah’s choice has been the vada pav, a potato patty stuffed between a local bun variant, topped with chutney. It’s hailed as the common man’s food in Mumbai, where street vendors do brisk business in the snack all day. But Shah, who like most Mumbaiites is no stranger to eating vada pav on the roadside, no longer heads to the nearby hawker for his fix. From two vada pav at a sitting, he’s down to two a week, but for the past few years, that order has been served at a regular shop, where gloved servers hand him his snack on a disposable plate and offer paper napkins as well. “Hygiene makes a difference even if it is junk food,” says Shah. “This is still authentic street food, but in a cleaner environment.”

As a concept, though, vada pav in a formal, restaurant setting is yet to take off. There are only two chains across India that serve the snack as the main item on the menu and, between them, have 280 stores. Driven by their success so far, these two companies want to create a pan-India customer base for this very regional food item by expanding outside Maharashtra, and taking on the ubiquitous idli and samosa to become an all-India snack. Where multi-cuisine Indian fast-food chains such as Haldiram’s, Bikanervala and Saravana Bhavan that have nationwide recognition, if not presence, are going rather slow on expansion, can Goli Vada Pav and JumboKing really succeed in their audacious plan?

 The first bite

It’s a humid afternoon in Mulund, a distant suburb in central Mumbai, and Venkatesh Iyer is looking for a cool place to sit inside his cramped Goli Vada Pav outlet. He peeps into the kitchen, where a potato vada is being fried to be served to customers waiting outside, to see if there’s a suitable spot and quickly decides to take the conversation to the nearby McDonald’s. “That’s much larger than our little stores,” he says.

The lack of space isn’t really an issue. When Iyer and his friend Shivadas Menon decided to set up Goli Vada Pav nearly a decade ago, the idea was mainly to serve authentic ethnic Indian snacks in a clean, hygienic environment — it wasn’t about becoming a sit-down restaurant where people would linger over their meals. “We wanted to make something that could be served quickly and in large numbers,” says the 47-year-old Iyer who before setting up Goli was running a corporate finance business with Menon. After much debate on whether to open an idli-dosa type South Indian snack outlet, they decided to go with their taste buds’ preference and in early 2004 opened the first outlet at Kalyan, in Thane district, with Rs 1 crore from their savings. 

Today, Goli Vada Pav has 224 stores across 10 states, including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, NCR and Gujarat. But Mumbai, the real home of the vada pav, has just nine stores, for a very good reason. “Why would anyone come to us when the snack is so easily available in any part of Mumbai?” Iyer asks. Last year, the company had a turnover of Rs 25 crore with a profit margin of close to 10% and is targeting revenue of Rs 40 crore in FY14. That growth will come from outside Maharashtra, says Iyer, where there is huge potential to charge a premium for the snack. “We sell the most basic version at #12 in Maharashtra. In Delhi and Bengaluru, the minimum price is Rs 20,” he says. So, even if volumes outside the state are lower, sales in value terms are comparable. “In Mangalore, we clock Rs 40,000 per day, which is as much as we make at Ranjangaon in Maharashtra.” 

It was this growth that prompted venture capital fund VenturEast to invest $4.7 million (then Rs 21 crore) in Goli in August 2011. KA Srinivasan, CFO, VenturEast, says Goli’s model has been proven in a large city such as Bengaluru (where the chain has over 65 stores) and also smaller towns such as Hubli, Tirupati and Agra. “Geographically speaking, this only means that the potential for growth or setting up new stores is unlimited,” he says.

Even as Iyer decided against carrying coals to Newcastle and began expanding early outside Mumbai, the other vada pav chain chose to do exactly the opposite. JumboKing, which is older by three years, was setting up more outlets in Mumbai around the same time Goli was being launched. When Dheeraj Gupta completed his MBA, he was keen on getting into the food business, but not through his family’s restaurant and hotel business. Inspired by the McDonald’s success story, he wanted to try something similar. “I wondered why there couldn’t be an Indian burger,” recalls Gupta. 

In 2001, with Rs 2 lakh borrowed from his family, he opened the first JumboKing store, offering variants of the local snack. With outlets located strategically near railway stations, the chain positioned itself not only on the hygiene and cleanliness plank, but also as the perfect finger food for people on the go. Starting out with both franchisees and owned outlets, JumboKing moved to an all-owned outlet model in 2004. 

It was a bad idea, Gupta attests, smiling wryly when you remind him of a mid-2008 interview where he spoke of JumboKing having 1,000 stores by the end of 2012, at a time when the chain had 45 stores. “We have not got anywhere near that,” he admits. Indeed, there are just 53 stores currently and a revenue of Rs 17 crore in FY13. 

Goli and JumboKing element

“We thought it was important to have control over processes and product quality. Today, we realise we do not need that level of control,” says Gupta. By insisting on company outlets, JumboKing lost out on two counts — time in execution and a deeper understanding of local markets. But then, there were important learnings. For example, when the brand ventured into Ahmedabad in 2007, customers were disappointed to see a 2,000 sq ft outlet that essentially had only one item on its menu. “Customers felt let down by such a limited range in a big store,” says Gupta. The learning: stick to smaller stores where the limited range won’t be an issue. Now, there’s a master franchisee model in place, where Gupta charges 6% royalty (the global norm) on sales. JumboKing is looking at a turnover of Rs 25 crore this year, says Gupta, who holds a 65% stake in the company, with the rest held by high net worth individuals who have invested Rs 8 crore in two rounds of funding in 2006 and 2009.

Prices at both chains are comparable. Rates start at Rs 12 for the plain vanilla version and go up to Rs 30, depending on the add-ons. While JumboKing has 12 types of vada pav on offer, Goli has eight, with options such as whole wheat pav instead of refined flour, and variants such as cheese, schezwan and sabudana. Sonia Mehrotra, associate professor at LN Welingkar Institute of Management, Development and Research and the co-author of a case study on Goli Vada Pav, says, “Even a samosa tastes different across India and it is imperative that a vada pav goes with the local flavour.” With Goli, that means introducing special variants for different markets, such as palak-makai in Bengaluru and masala vada pav in Indore. 

 McDonaldising vada pav

So far, so good. Both firms have plans to establish themselves as pan-Indian brands with a presence extending over several hundred outlets. Over the last two months, JumboKing opened its first outlet in Delhi, after forays into Mysore, Amravati and Raipur. The focus is to move outside Mumbai (which accounts for 29 stores) and close FY14 with 73 stores, heading to Lucknow, Gurgaon and Pune. “We plan to increase store count by 50% each year,” says Gupta.

Iyer is aiming for 800 stores in the next five years, at Kochi, Chandigarh and Jaipur, with a turnover of at least Rs 200 crore. Goli’s financiers believe in the numbers. Says VenturEast’s Srinivasan, “The Goli model is highly attractive to franchises because their capital investment is low, with the ability to break even quickly.” 

"The Goli model is highly attractive to franchises because their capital investment is low" - KA Srinivasan, CFO, VenturEast

There is certainly room for growth. The market for chain restaurants, according to Technopak, is $2.5 billion in size, with quick service restaurants (QSRs) accounting for half at $1.1 billion. At a projected market size of $8 billion in 2020, QSRs are expected to be as large as $4.2 billion, a whopping four-fold increase from today’s level. But what makes Iyer’s plan seem audacious is that no established fast food chain in India has anywhere close to that number of stores yet. There are 650 Domino’s Pizza stores, 250 McDonald’s restaurants and 407 Subway outlets in the country — and these are well-accepted brands serving food consumed all over India. 

Of course, there’s a world of difference between, say, a McDonald’s outlet and a vada pav stall. The fast food tag notwithstanding, the golden arches chain insists on some basics in its restaurants — air-conditioning, seating for a given number of customers, more staff to attend to customers and a minimum store size. The vada pav outlets won’t need any of these bells and whistles — the average store will be just 200 sq ft, staffed by three or four people, and will focus on takeaway or stand-eat-and-go customers. Which means it’s easier and cheaper to open stores.

What will also help the expansion of both brands is their supply chain, which is completely outsourced, with the companies owning nothing except the formula and the brand name, for which the franchisees pay a royalty. JumboKing sources 80% of its patties from Tasty Bites in Pune, while 20% comes from Vista Processed Foods, a subsidiary of OSI Inc, which also makes the McDonald’s burgers across the world; the mayonnaise comes from Mrs Bector Foods. For Goli, the patties are made by Vista Foods, while the mayonnaise comes from Unilever. Perishables such as the pav and chutneys are sourced locally at both firms. In addition, JumboKing has four cold rooms, in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Indore and Delhi, while Goli has outsourced this function and has 15 cold rooms across locations such as Bengaluru, Nashik and Delhi.

But, it’s significant that no regional food has made it big as a national brand yet. Indians are notoriously parochial when it comes to food and while dosas and idlis may have made it to the menu nationwide, there’s no pan-India chain dedicated to them. “Indian foods have significant regional variations that make it harder to standardise them,” says GV Ravi Shankar, MD, Sequoia Capital, an investor in Faaso’s. “But if someone can take the positives (variety and taste), standardise the product and solve the supply chain problem (Western brands are based on deep frozen cold-chain driven backends), the model becomes scalable.”

Even Haldiram’s and Bikanervala have multi-cuisine menus (from chhole-bhature to bhel puri, idli dosa and chowmein) and neither has anything close to a nationwide presence yet. Instead, as Gulpreet Gulri, country head, Subway India, says, it is global brands that have an aggregate 63% share of the domestic QSR market. That’s because Indian eateries are hit by a double whammy, explains Deepta Gupta, executive VP of the Rs 1,000-crore Bikanervala Group. Global chains have one base dish — burger, pizza, etc — while a multi-cuisine chain has a large menu, reducing scope for standardisation. Also, consumers aren’t willing to spend as much on Indian food. Barring a presence in Hyderabad, all of Bikanervala’s 34 outlets are in North India. “The recipe for success is to have about 90% of the standard menu but bring in a local touch. We have to ensure people come to our outlet for what we are best known: North Indian food.”

"The key to success lies in understanding consumers' needs and finding a place for the brand in their life" - Harneet Singh Rajpal, vice-president, Domino's Pizza India

That’s what makes Iyer and Gupta optimistic. “The vada pav has found appeal outside Maharashtra since it is positioned as ‘Mumbai’s favourite food’. People are curious since they may not have had it but are familiar with the name,” says Gupta. Iyer’s reasoning is along similar lines. “Potato as a vegetable has very high levels of acceptability across India. It is used in paranthas, chips and bondas and we knew we could capitalise on this,” he says.

"Outside Maharashtra, the vada pav has found appeal since it is positioned as 'Mumbai's favourite food'" - Dheeraj Gupta, founder, JumboKing

Even if taste buds are conquered, there are other challenges facing the QSR business. The huge potential notwithstanding, success doesn’t come easily, whether you’re an Indian or MNC chain. Harneet Singh Rajpal, vice-president, Domino’s Pizza India, points to many challenges — shortage of skilled manpower, development of the cold chain infrastructure network, high rentals, high food inflation levels and licensing requirements. “The key to success, though, lies in understanding consumers’ needs and finding a place for the brand in the consumer’s life,” he adds. The trick, then, for Goli and JumboKing: continue with the Chinese and cheese vada pav, but stick to the Mumbai roots. Oh, and continue to keep prices low.