"Contactless dining is here to stay", says Sanjay Mahtani of Hard Rock cafe

Food makes the world go around. But food that nourishes your soul and takes care of your gut health is a different experience altogether. The world is challenging various food related allergies. Gluten intolerance is one of them. Gut health is also becoming a reason why a lot of people are switching to enzyme rich food.

Currently, the India Gluten Free Foods & Beverages Market itself is projected at 189 million USD by 2024 registering a CAGR of 8.7%. Today, India is facing growing number of cases suffering with celiac disease and poor gut health. This is one reason that consumers are opting for gut friendly gluten-free products. Celiac disease is found to be more prevalent in Northern India, where wheat is primary staple cereal.

So how does one figure a diet around these challenges? We spoke to the founder and brand head of Fabcafe, Rebekah Blank, whose menu design is for all those who are looking for healthy food habits, without worrying about different food allergies.

How did Fabcafe started?

I am an American Indian who has struggled with gluten allergy since I was a young individual. I have worked all my young life designing diets. When I shifted to India, FabIndia was looking at starting something in the food segment. I understand food very well; and I understand gluten free the best due to my personal challenge with the food. They wanted to create this experience for their customers. Besides walking into the store, one would want to experience the brand that FabIndia is. So, Fabcafe was born; a celiac friendly food concept which offers healthy eating options as a café.

Why is Fabcafe a completely celiac friendly concept?

It is a fact that today, wheat and sugar have become death traps. The quality of wheat is not as it used to be; blame it on pressure on the ecosystem. Many people are complaining of gluten intolerance or celiac disease, something that leads to allergy of wheat, barley and rye. Also, after extensive study and data gathering, we realized, we wanted to offer a white sugar free substitute to our customer. Most of them come looking for alternate sweetening agents.

What is Fabcafe’s offering to its customer?

Fabcafe is a concept. It is an added experience that the brand wants to offer to its loyal customer. We would like to offer the home-cooked food experience to our customer. Therefore, our chef, Sunil Chauhan has curated the menu in a way that food is much tastier and less 'spicy' in all aspects. During this time, he did a lot of research in regional specialties cooked at home most of which have never been exposed to the world. His hands-on experience in various international cuisines has also given him a deep understanding and know-how of the evolving nouvelle Indian cuisine.

What are the expansion plans for Fabcafe?

We are currently offering 28 experience centres to our customer. This comprises the experience centre, a Tugbug and the Fabcafe. By the end of this year, we would have added 35 outlets to our kitty. We want to access the response and then plan to expand more. At the moment, we are banking our own properties. Our endevour is to provide the customer with what he or she needs. So, we are also in the process of launching our own FMCG line of healthy food products. They will be available on shelves at all FabIndia outlets and we will be improvising our menu to use them. These include things like cashew cheese (substitute for cheese), Gluten free cookies, chocolates in 3 variations (uses vegan milk option) and the likes.  Alternate food requirement is becoming the need of the hour and as a healthy food campaigner, we intend to help the consumer get what their body’s natural requirement is.

Tarun Mahadevan finished his grads in the UK and then joined a private equity in London and worked with them for a while before coming back to India and joining his father’s business who has set a new benchmark for the restaurant brands in India and Global market. “It was always in my mind that I would come back to India but after spending some time there learning aspects of businesses,” shared Mahadevan whose father’s ( M Mahadevan) restaurant brand Oriental Cuisine had to go buy back getting investment from the private equity company. “It was then he asked me to come and join the business as he was mostly looking at international operations,” added the young restaurateur who is now all set to revolutionise the empire that Mr. Mahadevan has built in over two decades. Excerpts from the interview:

What made you comeback to India looking after your father’s business?

I signed a three years agreement with my parents and told them that if I enjoy this would continue it else I would do something of my own. More than the job it is people that I love working with, people who have been associated with us for long and are now like a family. Our entire company believes in promoting culture, family, informal structure and no bureaucratic structure where we have kept everything very transparent. We have the highest retention rate in terms of other hospitality majors in India.

What gave the birth of Cool Cream Milano?

Oriental Cuisines was started by my father back in early 1990s that was the parent company that had many brands we have today. After PE investment buy back wherein the PE guys wanted the scalable formats like French Loaf and Wang’s Kitchen and we decided to keep the fine dining formats and we are using Cool Cream Milano as our new investment vehicle and our all brands will be under this brand.

How are you changing the brand according to the new generations?

We are working a lot on giving brand a fresh look as nobody in Chennai today wants to pay 600-1000 bucks for a meal if it’s not a 5-star restaurant. It has become a very price sensitive market. Today, you can’t fool a customer because they know what a good Burritos and Tacos etc are. Today, it is hard to find a continental restaurant as it is much more defined now; it is about Italian, French, Korean restaurant. Also, a lot of chefs who are doing epicurean concepts are focusing on localization. Hence, we are focusing a lot on customer satisfaction and engagement.  

Which is the top brand under your portfolio when it comes to getting more customers and revenue?

When we talk about our brands and when look at loyality programs and data, people who come to eat Indian foods their frequency is 6 times higher than any other of our Italian, Chinese or any other concepts. We have a restaurant called The Marina which is a sea food restaurant that does a significant amount of repetitive customers. We have a chinese, chettinad and a tandoor kitchen and a south coastal kitchen that caters to a lot of people. Another brand that is doing very good is The Writer’s Café wherein we are working with specially-abled people. Today, most customers don’t have time to give to charity so while providing such concept wherein people can give some time to charity along with a good cup of coffee is a great idea. Also, we are working on scaling lots of concepts, working on their models, generating lot of new customers. At group level we have repetitive customers of about 60-65 per cent which is the last three months average.

What is your expansion plan?

Tie-II and tier-III cities are a lot on our target. We are looking at cities like Hyderabad, Surat, Jaipur to name a few. If Mumbai’s rental decides to behave themselves we will look at Mumbai also. In next five years we will be present in a lot of cities in North and West India.

How are you creating a difference at the brand level after joining the business?

I am spending a lot of time understanding customer and market. I have been trying to understand the business in India and my father and his team has been a great support in making me understand about the market. It’s not about what’s different but what’s needed for the market right now. I am working a lot on building our social media presence, technology and helping the supply chain and backend by using the latest technology, enhancing customer experience as well as the employee experience. Aggressive growth with technology would be something that I would be focusing on.

Neotia Group has been in hospitality business for really long time but they have really started focusing on this sector only in last four-five years. “Many years ago when I was just out of college and was involved in real-estate development and was building small office buildings in Kolkata. At that time due to some reason I was visiting London with my father who was there on a business and has to meet a business associate at a business club in London and I also accompanied him there. I was quite impressed to see the infrastructure and when I came back to Kolkata I was thinking the office buildings that I was making could I dedicate a space of around 3000 sqft where I could do a business club,” shares Harshvardhan Neotia, Chairman, Neotia Group that runs restaurants like Sonartori, Afraa and Global Restaurant chain UNO Chicago Bar & Grill in India.

It was back in mid 1980s when he thought to open a similar kind of concept in the country. But it didn’t work for years. It was then he asked his friends to check why it was not working, the answer was it was run by a Marwari boy who himself is a vegetarian and a teetotaler and how would he understand gourmet-non vegetarian cuisine and a good well-stocked bar, is a commerce graduate and is doing it out of fad as he comes from industrial background. “The fact was it was not a fad and I deeply believed in it and therefore I tried to redeem it by ensuring that over the next few years food and the service and the experience the customer got was good and gradually the word spreads,” smiles Neotia who was conferred the Padmashri in the year 1999 for his outstanding initiative in the field of social housing. “But with god’s grace and our initial patrons the idea got clicked and we entered into the hospitality business,” he adds. It was in 2012-13 that they again started working on restaurant and hospitality business. Here are top key takeaways at his speech at 9^th Indian Restaurant Congress:

It is All about Persistent and Consistency: As we all know that restaurant industry has low entry barrier and with a few crores of rupees you can get started. But what we have learnt is that it is persistent and consistency that is hallmark of its success. You need to be consistent in whatever you serve.

Convenience v/s Experience: When you divide food business into two parts there are two types of segment- convenient based food and experience based food. Experience based food is enjoyed when you do outing occasionally basically to have good time at social interests place where it is heavy on experience. Whereas the convenience based are the shop next door where you grab a bite or this very new emerging trend of the dark kitchen/ cloud kitchen which is essentially providing you home-cooked or home-style food to meet your requirements of nutrition.

Sustainability is Driving the Biz: The young generations are very mindful of its social responsibilities. “When I speak to my children they often ask me about sustainable practices a lot more than I think it naturally occurs to me or people in my generation,” says Neotia who is very proud restaurants that are serving, healthy, fresh food using sustainable practices is a big hit and is a wonderful way to serve that part of our society.