Set the pace

MARKETING: Pulse Foods wants to set up a hyper-efficient chain to churn out Indian fast food in bulk.

Shaving equipment to fast food. Is there a connection? Saroj Poddar, chairman of Poddar Heritage Group and current FICCI chairman, is widely known as the man who brought Gillette to India, before Procter & Gamble (P&G) bought it over globally. Now he's setting up Pulse, a chain of quick service restaurants (QSR) that hopes to run a clockwork of low-cost, high-volume operations in India and even overseas.

The broad opportunity, according to Pulse Food's CEO Neeraj Jain, is in the market gap that exists between exotic fine dining and roadside dhabas. Outlets have already come up in Ludhiana, Bangalore, Pune and Delhi's NCR, and 20 more are coming soon. Some 60 outlets are planned across India in phase one, some 40 of them kiosks/carts, all supplied just-in-time by centralised sourcing and processing units. Yes, it's pretty much like the McDonald's model. Pulse's menu card starts enticingly low too, a la McDonald's soft-serve ice-cream, at Rs 5 for nimbu pani. There's the equivalent of French fries, chatpate aloo, as well. Meals range from a dal chawal combo for just Rs 35 to a non-veg combo for Rs 120. "We experimented with various combinations," says Jain, "For instance, in Gurgaon's Cyber Green we started with only paratha rolls since it was an office area. Later we extended it to mini combos in convenient paper boxes which can be had there or taken away."

Still, doing a McDonald's with Indian food, an idea that has struck Haldiram's already, would mean doing whatever must be done to gain the benefits of large scale production, and Jain says the company has done a year's research on supply chain management alone. Standardisation, consistency and efficiency are critical. "To be a successful chain," says Jain, "one has to have the same taste and same suppliers across the chain."

The same logic would apply to Pulse's overseas outlets, where it is looking for franchisees as well, though it wants everything else to stay consistent. The menu, specifically, must stay equally affordable. A glance at the pre-launch menu card for the UAE market confirms as much. Chinese, Mexican and Italian food have already invaded Western markets with quick service restaurant formats, and maybe it's time for an authentic Indian food chain to go global.

In India, fast food is a roaring business. By a KSA Technopak survey, Indians spend about Rs 2,500 crore annually on quick service restaurants, and there are about 100 million potential fast food customers. The question, really, is of converting the opportunity into big bucks. Is Pulse, then, going to set the market's pace? It may depend on how neatly it keeps itself shaven of waste "" not just in material, but time too.