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Upgrade with Rahul 'Burger Singh' with his take on health and fitness
95 Plays4 years ago
This week on the show, upgrade with Nakul & Rahul Seth the Co-Founder of Burger Singh talks about the many possibilities in food-tech. Tune in to know more about Rahul’s journey with Burger Singh, the challenges of operating in a money-conscious market and whether food delivery-apps are a bane or boon.
P.S. Rahul also happens to be Nakul’s first CrossFit trainer! Hear the story behind that too in this candid chat between two friends.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Show and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
hello guys welcome to upgrade with nakkol the point of the show is we meet interesting people they give us their productivity hacks the technologies they use
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to another exciting episode of Upgrade with Naqul and I have a very close friend of mine with me and he's Rahul. Rahul is co-founder of Burger Singh, a well-known burger delivery chain and more interestingly was my CrossFit trainer two years ago. It's an interesting combination so welcome Rahul.
Rahul's Fitness Transformation Journey
00:00:49
Speaker
Thanks man. And so to the listeners, so I
00:00:53
Speaker
I joined CrossFit two, two and a half years ago and Rahul was my first trainer and the first person who got me hooked into fitness and everything. You were my trainer for the first three months because you did the 6am classes. So yes. I'm right. Nobody has to do this and I had to still get into work. So it was like wrap everything up by nine o'clock and sort of get out. Yeah.
00:01:19
Speaker
And I know there is an interesting story behind you being into CrossFit.
00:01:24
Speaker
So, let's go into that first. Sure. How did you become a profit trainer? Because I've heard you were like me, you were like fat and I'm going to call myself fat because I am fat. When I was fat, I used to own it. I used to have a lot of fun, you know, doing it. I used to call myself fat, fat Buddha and I used to make people rub my stomach for good luck and everything. So, I mean, I had fun with it. I understand that, you know, that's a thing that people get over and all that.
00:01:49
Speaker
But basically, that's also sort of the reason like coming to your question, that's why I had to get into it, crossfit because I had become so all throughout my 20s, I had a fairly unhealthy sort of a lifestyle. There's a lot of drinking, partying, there's a lot of, you know, like maybe a KFC bucket for lunch, every maybe three times a week, you know, that that's the usual
00:02:11
Speaker
20s. Yeah, the usual 20s when you realize like you sort of grow up. So school I grew up like being an athlete and I played sport regularly. I played multiple sports and did all of that. But you get into your 20s and then you're sort of away from your parents and you have all these opportunity areas that have just opened up. You realize you don't have to take permission from people to do what you want. So you just sort of go. So yeah, I had a wild time and it was a lot of fun.
00:02:35
Speaker
So, how did you turn it around? Firstly, it started with the scare and I think the reason it's important to mention that in this context is because motivation matters a lot when it comes to doing things like turning your life around because essentially that's what it is.
00:02:51
Speaker
there's nothing there's no one aspect of fitness that just gets you there right you have to fix your food you have to start training there's like a thousand small adjustments that you make in your life so it's not going to happen without a serious motivation to do it and that I think is very important for people to sort of identify
00:03:09
Speaker
what that is and sort of use that to tune into that even as you're going through the journey because you need something to keep sort of reinstating the excitement or re-validating the reason why you're doing this. So for me it was that I tested like did a regular blood work thing I suppose and found out that I had high cholesterol and high blood pressure and I put on medication for both and I was only like 29 or something I was 29 at the time.
00:03:39
Speaker
So that was quite a short plus, you know, it's suddenly small things have started dawning up on me that you'd go for these vacations. And once in a while when we did end up playing like football on the beach or something, I realized I couldn't like I didn't have three minutes worth of sort of stamina in me to be able to do something. And I think that
00:03:59
Speaker
Like I think back on this and I think that not being able to play sport was almost like a bigger deal for me than the fact that I had a blood pressure problem and a cholesterol problem. So I don't know, it's like a chicken and egg situation. I don't know which one came first. But I started telling myself, I used to find myself saying repeatedly that, look, you're never going to be able to do this again.
00:04:25
Speaker
If you're never like I'm going to be 50 soon and then I'm never going to be able to play a sport competitively or with any amount of, you know, never really play a sport. And I loved how that felt. Like I spent my entire childhood playing sports and being active and doing, you know, going tracking and doing all these things. And like the fear of that sort of going away permanently was like a big, big sort of motivator.
00:04:47
Speaker
to do it so I mean actually once I did start it didn't take me long to like cut the fat especially so it happened in like two parts I'd say the first was the losing fat bit which happened playing like running a lot and playing tennis and I managed to cut it really fast too I remember now I think I think I cut like 36 kilos in like six months 36 to 40 kilos in like six months because I just like got in got back into that mindset that I'm gonna be an athlete again like I'm sort of going to live my life like an athlete
00:05:17
Speaker
And this is also the time when I had like I was in between different things that I was doing. So I used to run this small sort of consulting company, maybe companies to grandiose term. I had like a few employees and we had a few projects and that used to sort of keep me
00:05:33
Speaker
I'm not very ambitious with that. I just shut that down and I hadn't gotten into anything else yet. I also had this six month period where I was training four hours a day, five hours a day. I knew I had to pick something that I really liked. I picked tennis as just randomly out of a hatchet. What's the one sport that I would like to learn that I can't already play? Tennis seemed to be one that I always wanted to.
00:06:02
Speaker
So I just picked up tennis and then just sort of went to town. So it was six months of training, four hours a day or something. And I managed to cut that pretty soon. It's after that, then I got started getting interested in other things.
The Importance of Movement and Fitness
00:06:16
Speaker
Because then it was just about, I had so much more stamina and so much more energy.
00:06:21
Speaker
that's when I really started like I sort of just happened to drop into a CrossFit class and I was still very unfit like don't get me wrong like I lost some weight but I still couldn't like even do like a few push-ups or even one pull-up or you know any of that stuff so I just showed up for one class and then it just sort of kept growing and growing and yeah like a few years later I was coaching people and like it changed quite significantly yeah so I think for me the turning point was
00:06:55
Speaker
I realized that I couldn't eat out anymore. Because every time I eat out, then I was in a bad shape for next two days. At that point of time, I realized that I had to do something. And also because I was running cash why I didn't have enough time in the evening. So the only actually getting into CrossFit was very accidental because that was the only center open around my area, which was open at six at six o'clock in the morning.
00:07:12
Speaker
I love eating out and I couldn't, I think I turned 32.
00:07:21
Speaker
Because 6 to 7 was the only time I had. And then you got me hooked, right? I really just enjoyed, I remember the first two weeks, it was just exhausting. I wanted to puke every day. But I just kept coming back for more punishment. And after a month, it just became a habit. And I could see such a huge improvement in my work life, just because of that one hour in the morning.
00:07:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think it makes all the difference in the world, you know, like, especially the aspect of, you know, how you feel like people don't when when people before you get into it, there's a very limited vision with most people. It's like, okay, I need to look, look, lose a little bit of weight. Generally speaking, that's it. And I need to, you know, look a little better in my on the beach or whatever. And it's like something something like that. That's it. So it's vanity driven, usually.
00:08:12
Speaker
But once you get into it, there's so many other great offshoots from it. You feel more energetic, you feel more present, you can have other conversations better. And that's really the biggest payoff. That's the most fun part. That's the reason I think why people sustain a fit lifestyle once they get to it. Because all these other payoffs are so great.
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, so for me, the better thing has been sustainable weight loss. Nice, yeah. Even during COVID, I was doing nothing. I thought I would definitely gain back the weight, but I did not do that much.
00:08:50
Speaker
I mean, I definitely think, look, I'm definitely of the opinion that, you know, a lot of, as we, you know, our bodies haven't evolved as fast as generally speaking as civilization has evolved, right? So we are still like with food habits, you see that most of these preventable diseases now are a factor of eating things that our bodies haven't really evolved to absorb the same way in which, you know, at the same rate at which they've been adopted into your normal supply chain and food and so on.
00:09:19
Speaker
But that's also true with movement. Movement is cut out, which used to be such an integral part of the way humans were, is completely being removed from our lives. So I think we really underestimate the value that that has. And there's something just very primal about fighting. It's such a primal human...
00:09:37
Speaker
I really do believe that people underestimate the value that that has in just in terms of your well-being and your integration as a human being being able to sort of move every day and I think it has a huge spot and I think people that go through that experience on a regular basis and it can be anything it can be dance it can be you know whatever it is that you can be sport but it really sort of makes a difference
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah, my coach in boxing was this, I think she must be 25, 25 year old female who was a state level boxer from Haryana and she was timid, like very short and she would beat the fuck out of me every time.
00:10:24
Speaker
It was like being in a Matrix movie where the punches are flying and you don't know where they're coming from. I'm very familiar with that. So tell me, how did your burger sing journey begin? How did you get into that? And from being a fitness freak to running a junk food chain?
The Birth and Growth of Burger Singh
00:10:43
Speaker
So I don't technically run it. Burvesing was a friend's idea. Kabir is a friend of mine who I've known for some time now, even before he got into this. So I actually knew a lot of friends of his and he was in UK and I kept hearing of him but finally when I met him we did get along fairly well.
00:11:03
Speaker
It was always his idea to open progressing. In the beginning it was me, just sort of. So this was around the time when I was just getting started with this whole fitness thing. So on the timeline, the time that I said that I was just starting to play tennis to cut weight and so on.
00:11:18
Speaker
So I wasn't really all into fitness when it started off, especially not the CrossFit and everything else that I'm doing, not like gymnastics and the other stuff. The initial idea was just to sort of get on board and help him and another friend who were the original founders to get rid of the ground. So I've changed.
00:11:45
Speaker
So that went on for like a year, I think. In the beginning, it did reasonably well. We went from one outlet on Sun City on the Gulf Coast Road to I think about eight outlets by the end of that year.
00:12:02
Speaker
end of the first year and we'd already raised our first sort of angel round and so on but then I actually like after my first one-year stint I actually left for a while because it wasn't going to be my long-term plan like I hadn't envisioned it as at that point or something that I wanted to do it was more of you know I like startups I like that environment I know these guys really well they fit they're good friends
00:12:24
Speaker
And, you know, so I thought that that whole bit would be fun and it was. But at the end of a year, I was like, okay, I need to move on and sort of find something that I'm like really into to do. And so I actually left and then, you know, stuff happened and things didn't go according to plan and so on. And then I eventually got back into it about eight months, maybe was maybe 10 months.
00:12:48
Speaker
after the initial, after I left and then I've sort of been with them since. So that's sort of how it's gone.
00:12:57
Speaker
No, so tell me one thing. So is balancing a cloud kitchen concept? How do you how do you differentiate yourself from any other burger chain? No, so it's it's essentially a QSR and now QSR is a quick service or quick service restaurants. And the now a QSR can obviously exist in multiple formats. So you've got your international ones that everyone will know of which are the McDonald's and the Burger King and so on.
00:13:23
Speaker
And the reason I feel like a quick service restaurant is very different from a regular restaurant is because the supply chain, the preparation of food, everything is done with efficiency in mind. So the idea is to be able to turn out food fast from a business perspective for progressing specifically.
00:13:43
Speaker
It was that there was no sort of second burger player in India at the time. So when we got when Kabir opened the first outlet in November of 2014, and I think I must have joined like a few months after that, a couple of months maybe after that, there wasn't, McDonald's was it.
00:14:00
Speaker
Burger King was just getting into India. There were a lot of other American brands trying to break into the market at that point. I think Wendy's was trying to get in. Carl Zunter was trying to get in. And all these guys had like a couple of outlets each. So it was like way away. I'm talking about the genesis of the sort of
00:14:18
Speaker
was just heating up.
Adapting Burger Singh During COVID-19
00:14:22
Speaker
So what Kabir did was that he looked at all the sort of appears in the market and then he looked at the successful change in India and to him Domino's was by far the most successful one because I mean just in numbers they had like at that point I think 1200 outlets across the country now a lot more.
00:14:40
Speaker
And the thing that Domino's did really well was they kept their costs extremely streamlined. So your capital expenditure in opening a new outlet wasn't that high. Operationally, the expenses were kept very low. Domino's doesn't go into big expensive retail spaces. When you see their outlets, they have seating of maybe two or three tables. They don't open huge outlets.
00:15:04
Speaker
And the idea is to focus on delivery and provide a sort of standardized product at an affordable price and at a good quality. And that had just really worked really well. It had helped them scale really quickly, build a supply chain. So they got the larger the supply chain grew, the more economies of scale they generally had. So the whole thing had snowballed into this massive chain.
00:15:31
Speaker
I mean obviously Domino's is an established brand but the way they did it in India is slightly different from maybe other places. It's a pure franchise model. Yeah, so I mean Subway is a 100% franchise model. This is in India run by one company but yeah essentially it is still
00:15:47
Speaker
Yeah, so he looked at that and said that's what we need to do in the burger space because there's no one like that. McDonald's wasn't really focused on delivery. Burger King was just getting in so we didn't know what they were going to do. But no one was sort of there in the delivery space to that degree. Now this is still like early days and Zumato and Swiggy were just sort of also getting in, you know, getting started.
00:16:11
Speaker
But that was the original plan. Now the outlets
Challenges in Food Delivery Market
00:16:15
Speaker
and the product itself did really well because it was also the other thing that could be identified I think really well was that that a lot of products that really work with with brands like McDonald's etc. are the ones that have been customized somehow to an Indian palette. So like the McAloo Tiki with McDonald's is such a big deal and it was at a
00:16:36
Speaker
low affordable price point and it was it sort of wasn't intimidating for people to step into a McDonald's they would say okay that's an affordable price point I'm gonna go and then the next time they would upgrade into something more expensive and so on so so that you but but the customization of the taste to the Indian palate was key and the other brands were never going to be able to do this on a large scale because they had a different sauce in it right that's that that was different
00:17:03
Speaker
Correct! So, I mean, so, I mean, Burger Singh was essentially about just Indian flavors. So, flavors from across India fused with burgers. So, it was the sauces and the meats themselves also. The patties have different kinds of chemo, etc., according to a recipe that I sort of built and put together.
00:17:21
Speaker
Both those things like a heavy focus on delivery affordable prices, a good standardized quality and a strong supply chain was sort of the focus of the whole thing. So from that degree, we're not really a cloud kitchen model to sort of answer your original question.
00:17:40
Speaker
not just a cloud kitchen model, but that is our strength is in the supply chain and producing the product at a certain price point. So let's talk about pre-COVID, February. How many outlets? We were just around touching 50, I think. We were just around touching 50. We only recently started franchising seriously. So we played around with the concept a little bit.
00:18:09
Speaker
But we've just started franchising. So majority of them were still company owned. We've actually kept franchising throughout the COVID period and done really well with the whole franchising piece. So now we have about like, I think we have 25-30 in the pipeline, franchising that we've signed up. But our own outlets, I think we were just around it was either 48 or 50.
00:18:33
Speaker
Pre-COVID, what was your split between dine-in and delivery? You were still predominantly delivery first. I think it would have been something like 75% delivery to 25% dine-in. I have only visited one or two of your outlets where there was not really a choice to dine-in, but maybe take away. Is that true for all your stores?
00:18:58
Speaker
I mean, we do three kinds. We've got the cloud kitchen, which is delivery only, deliveries only. And then we have the takeaway version, which is on if you want to do a high street sort of a store, there's the takeaway version. And then there's the proper dining store, which is still not a very big dining store. I mean, you'd still have not more than 25, 30 covers, even at full capacity. Now, there are some notable exceptions. We've just signed one on the Dehradun Highway drive through.
00:19:28
Speaker
and that's going to be a much bigger store and then we signed a few other larger ones in Gujarat but generally speaking it's been the highest number having cloud kitchens then takeaways and then the smallest is the dining outlets. And were you guys operating during the lockdown time or was your operation completely shut?
00:19:48
Speaker
We kept the, so we had to cut back on costs. Obviously, everyone had to like, it was suddenly the market had died. So there was no dining, all of the dining, the 25% dining was out immediately. The takeaways were out. People for the first few months had completely stopped ordering. So we were down at like, we were only about 10% of pre COVID volumes all of a sudden.
00:20:10
Speaker
So, we had to like the outlets that were very expensive to keep running, we had to shut down. So, we shut down a lot of dine-in outlets, takeaway outlets. In a lot of cases, we were able to sort of go and, you know, go and have them on the, like, basically come to some sort of an agreement with them. So, we lowered a lot of costs and we were able to, you know, get to a point where we weren't bleeding cash, at least.
00:20:38
Speaker
but primarily the ones that were running were the cloud kitchens and they were the sort of saviors.
00:20:44
Speaker
What is your take on Zomatos and the swigis of the world? I mean like everything else there's like a good side and a bad side to it. They've expanded the market phenomenally. Obviously like the deliveries become like a everyday sort of a thing. Most people now, I mean although our numbers still don't come anywhere close to China's for example but the average person is ordering a lot lot more now.
00:21:15
Speaker
then they would previously, I mean most people would order out like at least two times a week or three times a week. No, so I have friends in China and they don't have a kitchen. They don't have a kitchen and I was shocked and they said you don't need a kitchen because you can order every meal and they order every meal.
Innovations in Food Industry
00:21:34
Speaker
Of course, some of them are, most of them are bachelors.
00:21:37
Speaker
But still, yeah, they order something like 50 billion take-away meals a year or something, the last I heard. So it's crazy the number that they do. And I think they start growing here as well. So I mean, to that end, look, these guys have done a great job. Obviously, they've expanded the market. They've been able to optimize delivery costs, for instance, because as an independent restaurant owner, you know, running, hiring delivery boys and paying
00:22:04
Speaker
paying them and doing the marketing etc those costs have come down for restaurants so people keep complaining about the commission but for someone like us our average order value is around 300 rupees a ticket and if I was to do delivery on my own I'd end up paying something like 100, anywhere between 80 and 100 rupees for the delivery alone so that's 33% of my order gone
00:22:29
Speaker
on delivery. Now, even if Zomato definitely doesn't charge that much, so the overall costs have gone down, the volumes have sort of gone up, right? And that's the good part. The thing that sort of stemmed off from there, which most restaurants would say has become the big challenge with the aggregators is that also because it's such a
00:22:51
Speaker
big marketplace now it's very highly competitive so all our margins have suddenly disappeared in order to get higher volumes you keep competing with the other restaurants for you know on discounts and whatever you say at the end of the day in the other way discount driven market like there's no amount of I shouldn't sound like a cynic but there's you know running a discount goes a lot further than you know just a clever innovation to the product so
00:23:18
Speaker
No, but that's true. India is a price-conscious market. And if there are 10 burgers and there is one cheaper, the cheaper will sell, even if it's yuck. Yeah, I've definitely seen that. There's absolutely no doubt that that's the case. So, I mean, in that sense, what it's doing, like the effect that it's having by creating this big marketplace, so you're now not just restricted by
00:23:45
Speaker
the restaurants that you've tried out in the past, as a consumer sitting at home, you're not just restricted by the outlets that you've tried out. You suddenly have like 500 options on your phone. The competitiveness of the marketplace is going to increase and everyone is going to, in order to stay competitive for price, is going to keep dropping the quality down.
00:24:05
Speaker
I don't see that as being really great for the industry in the long run, obviously. So I mean, yeah, that that bit is challenging. But like everything else, like it's a it's a, you know, the pros and cons. And I try not not to think of it as a good or a bad thing and just, you know, try and understand the space so you want to understand how to how we can navigate through it. Yeah. But I understand you also have your own platform where you can order, right? Yeah. Does that help?
00:24:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we have a direct channel. So we used to do a website call center. At some point in time, it's not always been on in the sense that we have sort of temporarily switched off from time to time. But because it is more expensive to do deliveries on your own and and sort of to get repeat customers and so on.
00:24:54
Speaker
Having said that, those are indispensable sources because you have to have a direct touch point with your consumer. I won't say anything is more important. We do have our own and we plan to continue developing those in the long run.
00:25:10
Speaker
What about what about technology in your back end kitchen? So I'm I've been reading a lot of innovation happening in kitchen robotics and how that is the way forward. Do you see that happening in India? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Look, it has to happen everywhere because big day
00:25:30
Speaker
Technology is about optimizing things. So as long as there are opportunity areas in a market that's expanding, someone is going to come out with clever solutions. Every time that new clever solution comes out, it's going to get optimized to some degree. Now, you may call it technology, but in some cases, it would just be data analytics that would help you sort out, employ
00:25:53
Speaker
let's say 50 less people than you had to in the previous year. So all of these things are solving problems and more and more technology is all smaller and smaller.
Burger Singh's Business Strategies
00:26:07
Speaker
So to give you an example, just managing inventory and supply chain is such a critical part of this whole space, of running a restaurant and it's such a huge part of it.
00:26:19
Speaker
Any optimization that can be done there in terms of managing inventory and better predicting what your indenting is going to be at each store, any optimization that you can have over there leads to such a massive saving for the company overall across that many stores. That is going to immediately sort of catch on.
00:26:42
Speaker
And similarly, so just from when we started there have been new technologies in the point of sale software that have come in the new technologies in the integrations that are being used between the payment platforms like ATM etc and and and tomato there being.
00:26:59
Speaker
better integrations and new technologies that help deliver rider management and to most easily access the closest available rider, that sort of thing. There have been optimizations that have been done within Swiggy and Zomato that have driven their volumes through the roof. Yeah, no, but you I should talk to, I don't know if you know Mukon Foods.
00:27:21
Speaker
Shout out to DB. DB is a close friend and he runs Mukon Foods out of Bangalore. And they started out with the automated Dosa Maker, which you see everywhere now. And now they have gone really deep. So they have a biryani machine. Of course, they have the pizza machine and everything. And they serve a lot of international clientele food chains. And for them, the main goal is standardization. So every one of them.
00:27:51
Speaker
How do you get the same food, the same taste levels? Everything. He was telling me about this biryani machine where even the mixing of the rice and the chicken and everything happens by robotic arm and this is being made in India and you know I would love to see a burger being assembled and every time the ratio of sauce to patty kind of thing remains.
00:28:17
Speaker
I'm pretty sure that we'll get to a point now where we'll not just will you be able to get the right amount of sauce, you can also, you know, these platforms will evolve enough to then compare that data of how much sauce was used and correlated to your rating so that every person gets their own customized right level of sauce, you know, like, so if you only like you don't like mayonnaise and you like something else and then without anyone having to have a conversation about it.
00:28:45
Speaker
I can say, hey, don't only put 20% ketchup and 30% mustard. Yeah, I'm saying that eventually it will probably get to a point where you won't even have to say that, like just because of your rating and the cross relation of technology at some point, I'm sure that, you know.
00:29:03
Speaker
Depending on my last 10 orders, they will decide what do I like. What do you like exactly? I think Zomato and Sugi are already doing it because I keep... So when I open my Zomato app versus somebody else's Zomato app, we have different recommendations. Yeah that they do for sure.
00:29:21
Speaker
So I know that the algorithms are currently based on what your spending capacity is, what are the cuisines that you normally order and with what frequency. So they optimize for conversion and they optimize exactly for menu opens to check out. And so whatever restaurants within your most preferred cuisine have the highest possibility of converting you as a customer is the one that you'll see first.
00:29:47
Speaker
And maybe probably whoever is spending the most on the platform. I am always fascinated by the food business and especially for example, if you just talk about burgers and I'm sure you guys have already perfected that. Burger delivery is such a difficult task because
00:30:11
Speaker
you know that after half an hour, the bun will get soggy. How do you make sure that what is the optimum time of delivery so that, and you have both customers, you have the dine-in customer and also the delivery customer. So do you differentiate a burger on, hey, this guy's dine-in is gonna eat right now. Let me put maybe, I don't know, less sauce in it or more sauce in it. And then, oh, this is delivery. So how do I make sure that the bun is not soggy enough when it reaches, because it's a bad experience.
00:30:40
Speaker
Right. So, I mean, there's things that you can do, steps you can take in the actual preparation process that make it easier. So, for instance, how you layer the burger and where the sauce is on the burger makes a huge difference. You can, for instance, layer it with things like lettuce, etc., in strategic ways so that it doesn't seep into the bun. For example, that is one of the things we started doing when no one else was doing it, which is why we were able to, so we had basically moisture barriers between the wet elements of the burger and the dryer elements.
00:31:09
Speaker
that allowed us to keep our burgers fresh for like 45-50 minutes or until they got to the customer. But the other thing that's happened with Zomato and Swiggy is just because of the sheer number of riders that they have available, they are able to get these deliveries done in something like 15-20 minutes in most cases. Majority of the deliveries only take that much time.
00:31:29
Speaker
And because our processes are so streamlined, so you were talking about that magnetic arm that does the biryani. At the back end, the entire preparation of the food is not touched by hand. It does happen in factories currently already where the patties, etc. are put together and the machine processes are not touched by hand at all.
00:31:48
Speaker
in the entire supply chain process till it gets delivered to the outlet. At the outlet, you know, cooking a burger is not rocket science. It's just like flipping it over a few times and then assembling the burger and putting it out, right? So it's fairly simple. Yeah, you're right. Maybe we will see that day where that will just be done by a robot also. And I won't need to have any people inside a store. That mechanism will just run itself.
00:32:14
Speaker
Yeah, so that's the first part of it is that you can actually do things to ensure that it doesn't sort of seep through to the bun. The second part is that these guys have made the deliveries a lot easier now. So it takes like 25 minutes for the product to get to your house from the time that you order it.
00:32:35
Speaker
And with the dining takeaway question, no, we just expand our capacity accordingly. So when we know in places like cannot place, et cetera, where we know there's going to be a certain amount of dining crowd. See, over a period of time, the demand at different various hours becomes fairly predictable. So you know what's going to happen on an average Friday or an average Saturday and how many orders you're going to get within a certain period. So you can just sort of equip your staff and everyone else to sort of cater to that.
00:33:04
Speaker
We look at a lot of data for supply and we have very high sort of reliance on data. So it helps us sort of, I feel better predict these situations. Yeah, because I live very close to one of your outlets. I also remember you were the first ones to introduce midnight delivery, delivery teleport. How did that come about? Yeah, I just mentioned my 20s, where we had like,
00:33:29
Speaker
where we spent a majority of our time partying and then not having to eat really shitty parathas at zaika every time and there wasn't always an uber around to drive you back then, I mean there were no ubers so unless you had that one sober friend who was willing to drive you at 3 o'clock in the morning
00:33:49
Speaker
Your option was either, you know, cook yourself a Maggi or do something else. So obviously the first thing we thought of was like, we thought of it as a really important need, you know, that it's like, like, it's really important to have food. That should be obvious for every delivery restaurant, right? But you guys did it. Did you see encouraging number when you started it and how is it being
00:34:12
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Like even now there are spaces that we get into that still don't have it, right? So we enter new cities all the time. Like we went into Hyderabad recently with about nine outlets and we were doing late night deliveries and we started off in like week one, we were doing between 300 and 400 orders per kitchen per day just because we were absolutely killing the late night market because the competition in that segment was just like so, so low.
00:34:38
Speaker
I'm sure you would have those interesting customer stories which you would talk about during train. I honestly don't have a lot and it's because I don't deal with
00:34:54
Speaker
think, but look, there are people who are, look, I don't want to, obviously, if I had had a disagreement with someone, then I'm obviously on the other side of that argument. So it would just be polite to sort of, you know, pick on anyone. But but there have been very interesting calls that we've had about people that are upset about various things. People look, I'm over, you know, even outside Burgh Singh, I'd realized at one point that look, no matter what you do, there's going to always going to be a certain amount of people that are not satisfied entirely with what, right.
00:35:22
Speaker
So there are always those people calling up and just declaring that they're dissatisfied with something that you would normally just attribute to subjective choice and you won't really think anything about it. But people call to say all sorts of things. And the funniest ones that I find are always people that call and say, so people actually call you up and take my feedback.
00:35:52
Speaker
Oh yeah, about everything, about absolutely everything, about little lines that we have on the sanitizer packet, about the color of a certain packaging, about... There's so many interesting YouTube videos, like I... I didn't even know it was a thing, like I didn't know because you're not prepared to look out for something like that. So the first time I actually happened to YouTube, I was saying,
00:36:15
Speaker
I found a whole bunch of really, really interesting YouTube videos of people that have done this burger versus that burger, only eating Burger Singing for like 24 hours. This is what they put in every single Burger Singing burger on the menu. And then this guy over three days is doing nothing but ordering Burger Singing burgers and opening them and tearing them apart and talking about the flavors, etc.
00:36:37
Speaker
So it was like, so I and that was like, I didn't know even to sort of look out for something like that. So yeah, absolutely. There's people who have whatever from all the funniest customer call that I got was so we also have a few orders in London. And we I got a customer call from a guy who had been to our outlet in London, and then gone back to South Africa.
00:37:07
Speaker
and I wanted to now open a bugising, basically bring bugising to South Africa and he went on with me for like 45 minutes to an hour and I can't believe, I can't remember his name now because he turned out to be the brother of this cricketer but I can't remember the cricketer's name now.
00:37:24
Speaker
But he basically wanted to open an outlet and bring it to South Africa and he went on for like a one hour long conversation about the experience and he started like drawing up various examples of situations you could imagine where people would have a witnessing and all that.
Future Plans and Personal Life Changes
00:37:41
Speaker
But did you finally end up opening it? No, because we weren't keen on expanding the supply chain. It's just spreading yourself through things. That's not a core competency. We've done London now, and London was growing, but it took an enormous amount of bandwidth to get it off the ground.
00:38:00
Speaker
It's not our main thing. We will consider it at some point for sure. There are a lot of Punjabis in Canada and so on. So, we constantly get requests from other places and we will do it at some point, but just not now. So, how has it been post-COVID for BBC?
00:38:21
Speaker
What kind of recovery are you seeing? What do you think is the future of food at large after COVID? It's, I mean, it's promising now for sure. The delivery bit is, so the two aspects of it really, I'd say, like one is that we've had to sort of optimize all our costs, which we've done reasonably well. The cloud kitchens were a big savior for us because we were already delivery first and didn't have very expensive sort of operating costs. Like I mentioned earlier,
00:38:50
Speaker
we sort of managed to bridge the gap on the lost revenue very, very easily or a lot better than some other players were able to do, for instance. But that's not sustainable. Those costs will come back.
00:39:05
Speaker
I mean, those costs will come back as you start, as you keep growing, as you keep sort of reopening stores, but you can intelligently just choose to, you know, now do it only. Look, we have a clear vision on what's going to happen now. Dining is not going to suddenly come back.
00:39:23
Speaker
And we are fairly like even if there is a vaccine situation and it gets rolled out, it will be very obvious how that sort of market is stepping up. So for us to now open up new avenues, I think will be fairly easy because we'll see what's happening and then it doesn't take us a lot of time to sort of open a new space.
00:39:44
Speaker
So we'll be able to get into that in a measured way. So I don't think there's any risk there anymore. I think we've sailed through the toughest part of this whole thing. And we're now doing a lot of franchises and the cloud kitchen model breaks even so early that it just makes business.
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, it's very easy to keep it going. And deliveries on their own are almost 75% of what they used to be, even pre-COVID now. So I'm assuming that by the time we get into Diwali and, you know, and just the festive season and then New Year's, I'm estimating it to be as close to, you know, normal. In fact, it might even go up now because the people that were previously going out to restaurants to eat, etc., there's going to be ordering home. So that will change for you.
00:40:32
Speaker
So, tell me one thing and I'm asking this because we are always constantly debating this in Casify. So, we have also offline stores and we have just gone into franchising and we just do franchisee stores. The debate is always, hey, how will it affect your brand? Will you be able to maintain quality? Do you also have those doubts internally? I mean, see the doubts are always there because essentially you're now giving away
00:41:02
Speaker
your baby and something you put together way you know you and your team have put together very carefully and now you're sort of giving it out to someone else to handle it right so there's obviously going to be a concern there's also in India a lot of easily available examples of what can happen when franchising goes wrong
00:41:19
Speaker
I mean, McDonald's is a big example, right? No, let's not even think that they were. I think, for example, I hate Guyani or Vajiva. You could find a Vajiva in every nook and corner of Delhi at one point of time. And I think he franchised hell out of it. And that was the end of Vajiva.
00:41:39
Speaker
Yeah, look, so I mean, there's definitely that risk without a question. The things that work to our advantage a lot with franchising is that one is that all the cooking is done at the back end, right? So the stores, like I said, are just assembly units. There's no cooking that happens. There are bunco, you put the bun in the toaster, you grill the patty for a few minutes, and then you wrap it and then you remove it.
00:42:01
Speaker
This is the same with all the other brands. So Beside Burger saying we have Bullhub, there's another brand and there's a few other brands in other cuisines that we are launching now in Momos and Biryani and so on that we will launch very shortly.
00:42:16
Speaker
And the thing with all of our things is the same, that everything, all the cooking is done at the back end, so the outlets themselves are just assembly units. And so the actual area for someone to be able to mess up at least in terms of the food is very low, right? There's not that much, it's not like your food quality doesn't depend on the mood of your chef on that particular day because it, you know, it doesn't matter, the product is
00:42:39
Speaker
fairly standardized your market fluctuation that happened in normal restaurants you know all of that sort of gets taken away just gets taken out of the equation so from that end there's the chance for someone to mess up is very low like i'd say the chance for someone to mess up inside a subway is very low like how many times do you go into a subway i mean i'm not saying it doesn't happen but it's it's it's less frequent than going into a dana choka and finding different quality food
00:43:04
Speaker
I think Indian food franchising is super tough. It's very tough. I mean, even franchising your scalability is only tough because you say, how do you ensure the same level of, you know, every chef has a different, slightly different way of cooking. So, if it's going to be, even if you standardize all recipes and standardize everything, there's always going to be somewhat of a difference because the kitchen is a busy environment. Especially, if you are cooking in a tandoor,
00:43:31
Speaker
That is something so difficult to replicate in every cook. For example, I would love to have an Indian QSR which could really scale up, but you don't find them. You don't find the same quality dal, you don't find the same quality tannuri chicken. It's every order on itself. No, I agree. It's for the same reasons. You buy chicken from the local market, all your produce is, you know, sort of...
00:43:58
Speaker
is fresh and that will vary from day to day. The chef will vary. So there's a lot of... I'm sure that people will do it well, but it's a very, very difficult thing to do. So do you guys also plan to get into Indian sometime? We have Indian dishes as a part of bowl hub already, but those are single serve bowl meals. Also thought of heat in serve model. But not in the way that like dana choga would be or like Punjab grill or something like that would be.
00:44:26
Speaker
Okay, now to one of the most interesting aspect. When I pinged you, you told me you have moved to Goa.
Conclusion and Reflection
00:44:33
Speaker
Yeah. How does that happen? So I've been here for the last three months or so now.
00:44:39
Speaker
And it's been great. I mean, look, the biggest thing was that if my own job is mostly numbers and tech and sort of business development. So most of my work can get done over Zoom calls and phone calls. And everyone going into the office in any case, like we realized very quickly that
00:45:01
Speaker
I mean, we shut down the office fairly quickly, fairly early into this whole lockdown situation. And working from home has really actually worked really well for us. So at a company level, like I think we've just been able to, like the people, the, you know, the younger crowd that we had was sort of motivated enough that we were able to, you know, that we were able to
00:45:24
Speaker
keep the whole thing going without much of a setback. So we've been able to keep most of it going fairly well. And yeah, so I thought if I'm going to work from home, then I might as well have the home in a place that's more fun. That would be so cool. I can't imagine.
00:45:42
Speaker
Hey Rahul, thanks a lot for speaking to me. I have taken a lot of your time and I love this convention station. I had a blast. I hope you had a good time as well. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I should have taken a lot more time to find out more stuff about you. We didn't get to talking about you a lot. So I feel a little bad about that, but it was a lot of fun. So guys, upgrade work here.
00:46:13
Speaker
and we are listening to Update with Knuckle, a production of the 14.8. Don't forget to like and subscribe.