BS People: Sanjeev Kapoor

Galloping gourmet

Akshay Kumar may be lording it over the idiot box with his culinary skills now, but Sanjeev Kapoor is the real “kitchen king” of Indian TV. His show Khana Khazana has been running on Zee TV for 17 years, and come New Year, Kapoor will have his own 24x7 food & lifestyle channel called FoodFood, in an alliance with Malaysian media group Astro.

The popularity of the Zee show and Kapoor’s marketing savvy have helped this 46-year-old graduate of Delhi Catering College (he also has a management degree in marketing from Narsee Monjee, heeding his father’s advice that “for my calibre, I hadn’t studied enough”) build a variety of businesses.

Kapoor today runs some 20 restaurants under three brand names: The Yellow Chilli (medium segment), Khazana (speciality Indian fine-diners in the Middle East) and Hot Rocks (built around the stone grill concept), which have annual revenues of around Rs 50 crore. “We are working on another format called Indii, serving young-age Indian cuisine,” said Kapoor, adding the venture in partnership with Better Value Brands could be located in Europe or the UK.

Kapoor already has a presence in these markets through his Khazana range of pickles and ready-to-cook spices, but it's a small business that he hopes to ramp up to “Rs 100 crore in three years”. What he is keen on, instead, is Wonderchef, where again he has a partner —Ravi Saxena, former head of Sodexho in India. Launched a year ago, it is an innovative direct marketing business that involves training members on how to become good cooks with products endorsed by Kapoor embedded in the programme.

But TV is where it all started and Kapoor has no doubt there is a market for a food channel in India: “We should have started it three years ago.” There are plans also for a reality show, “no, not like MasterChef”, but Kapoor isn’t revealing details yet.