Chennai based QSR brand Oh My Shawarma launched its operations in Bengaluru; bets on Hybrid model for expansion

Chennai-based QSR Chain has recently launched its operations in Bengaluru.

Founded in 2017 by Mohan Ram, Gopinath Rangan and Praveen Kumar, the brand specializes in selling different varieties of Shawarma and currently has 15 outlets across Chennai and Bengaluru.

Mohan Ram, an IIM Udaipur alumnus was previously associated with startups like Zoomcar, Zomato and Paytm. Gopinath Rangan was previously part of Karvy Logistics and Chai Point. Praveen Kumar was part of Nearbuy and Redbus before turning to entrepreneurship.

Global Street Foods with an Indian Touch

"Shawarma is a widespread street food with various avatars across the globe. We wanted to give a desi twist to the product. We spent close to 6 months before our launch to come up with a perfect recipe that is a fusion of Indian, Lebanese and Mexican cuisines. We were the first outlet in India to launch 20 different varieties of Shawarma" says Gopinath.

Eclectic Foods Pvt Ltd which owns the brand has diversified into verticals like cloud kitchen, Meat retail and FMCG. The Company plans to launch a house of brands targeting mainly street food. " We position ourselves as an organized player in the unorganized street food market which has a huge potential. We will soon be launching global street foods with an Indian touch. We plan to open 50 outlets in the next one year" adds Mohan on the company's future growth plans.

It has to be Retail and Cloud

Speaking about the developments in the cloud kitchen space, Co-founder of the company Mohan Ram says "We believe in the concept of Hybrid model where both the retail space and cloud kitchen exists. Pure cloud play has its own challenges. Cost saving on rental, service manpower, and other overheads is offset by the higher commission on the aggregator platforms which ranges from 25 per cent to 30 per cent. This commission is bound to increase further when the aggregator feels the margin pressure.

The increased dependency on Food aggregators poses a lot of disadvantages for the Cloud kitchen model like unavailability of Customer data, Logistics shutdown, Outlet Listing issues etc. Unlike a physical store, here they are competing with a plethora of outlets that win an order by just offering huge discounts. So you have to keep up with the competitors by offering discounts which puts further pressure on the margin. Also, the brand connection with the customers that we see in a physical outlet is missing in the cloud kitchen model. We take a conscious effort in building relationships with our customers. Currently, we have more than 50 per cent repeat customers across online and offline channels.

Future Plans

The company clocked revenue of INR 6 crore during FY 22 -23 and targets to double it in FY 23-24.

"We want to build a sustainable business model in this space with the right fundamentals. We have a strict policy of achieving operational breakeven in less than 3 months and a payback period of 9 months for each store that we open. We are also building an ecosystem which comprises QSR, mini food street, Cloud Kitchen and Meat Shop. In our model, cloud kitchens help in improving our capacity utilization. Meat shop is our first vertical integration effort which helps us in having complete quality control and also improves our margin.

Since we position ourselves as an organized street food player, our pricing is only slightly higher than unorganized street food stalls. So we had to take all efforts to improve our gross margin" adds Mohan.

This story is provided by ATK.will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/ATK)

( With inputs from ANI )

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor