Selling street food on cleanliness plank

McDonald's burgers and Domino's pizzas have finally found a desi match in bun-samosa and naaniza's. Homegrown food retail company Street Foods of India (SFI) promoted by Zorawar Kalra, son of famous chef Jiggs Kalra, is gearing up to expand its Quick Service Restaurants (QSR) under the Street Foods of India brand name across north India. Five SFI outlets are already operational in and around Delhi and eight or nine more will open within the calendar year.

Also on the cards are Street Foods of India food-carts. "I want to make SFI accessible to all. We are working on launching designer food-carts that will be placed around the city for people to sample quality Indian street food at very affordable prices," says Kalra. The concept is popular abroad, where street food companies retail ham burgers and local cuisines via hygienic push-carts.

Quality Indian street food at affordable price points is the USP of SFI, which has entered the Rs 450-crore branded fast-food market in the country. Its eating joints will compete for a share of consumers flocking McDonald's, pizza-chains and regional cuisine restaurants.

The entry-level price on the SFI menu is Rs 20, while the costliest dish is priced at Rs 280. Says Kalra: "Nothing can replace the taste of a home-cooked desi cuisine. With our low pricing strategy, I want to attract all classes of consumers." On offer are dishes like bun-samosas, naan and dal makhni dish, kadhi-chawal and biryani. Funded by a group of investors including Amit Burman of Lite Bite Foods, Ajay Bijli of PVR Cinemas, and others, SFI has a mandate to open both Quick Service Restaurants and full-service restaurants across the country.

However, this is not the first time that a QSR-chain has been launched on the affordability plank. Some years ago, Yo China, a Chinese restaurant chain, was launched in the Delhi-NCR region.

Today, the company has shed its tag-line "Chinese Food, Chinese Prices" as it could not maintain the "affordability" plank. The cost of operations shot up as prices of petrol, diesel, food raw material and rentals rose. "We were not able to make money on our offerings. So the positioning had to be changed," said a Yo-China executive. But operating on low margins does not bother Kalra. "Once my entire distribution is in place, my margins will improve. Plus, we are focusing on 15-20 items in the menu, therefore, controlling our input cost to some extent unlike others," he says.

However, SFI's challenge will be to manage real estate rentals.

"The rentals in the Delhi region or for that matter even in cities like Chandigarh or Ludhiana are very high. A 1,000 square feet area in any of the leading malls may cost Rs 1.75 lakh to Rs 3 lakh. So the food proposition should be such that it attracts major sales on a daily business to rake in annual profits," says a food industry analyst.

But an expert in food retailing says that chains like SFI could succeed "provided the model can be sustained over a period of two to four years".