On a Wrap and Roll

Jaydeep Barman: Age, 37. A degree in production engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. An MBA from IIM-Lucknow. Worked in a start-up company in Pune. A management programme at INSEAD, France. Five years with McKinsey in London.

The CV sure is impressive.

His calling card says he is Founder/CEO, Faaso’s Food Services Pvt Ltd, with an Andheri, Mumbai, address.

“One thing I hadn’t done before was run a restaurant,” says Jaydeep, at his Andheri office. “We wanted Faaso’s to be an entrepreneurial company and an iconoclastic brand,” he adds.

He and his friend Kallol Mukerjee started Faaso’s with an investment of Rs 8 lakh, in 2003 in Pune, when he was working with Brainvisa, a start-up.

What does Faaso’s do? It is a quick service restaurant – or QSR in industry parlance—that serves up wraps, that is, rolls with fillings.

Why wraps? Jaydeep says that on his travels to the US on work he would come across different fast-food chains – Taco Bell, McDonald’s – but none serving Indian food. That was the trigger for him to start Faaso’s. The name was cooked up during a late night party. It is an acronym but you will not be able to print the expansion, Jaydeep says with a grin.

In 2010, Jaydeep quit his job at McKinsey and come back to Pune to take charge of Faaso’s, which then had only one outlet. Since then, it has expanded and now has 33 outlets, 22 in Mumbai and 11 in Pune. Outlets will be opened in Bangalore and other cities to take the number to 50 by December and to 100 by June next.

Last year, Jaydeep and Kallol pumped in more money into the company, got funds from Jaydeep’s boss in his previous job Anand Lunia, who is also an angel investor. Sequoia, a venture capital firm, invested about Rs 20 crore in Faaso’s in October 2011. Jaydeep and Kallol together have majority ownership of the company.

Jaydeep’s idea is to make Faaso’s the largest F&B player (Food and Beverages) and also one of the most interesting companies in India. To achieve this, they realised they had to do things differently. For a starter, they decided not to employ anyone – apart from store managers – with a background in the restaurants business. They would have a University of Wrap-ology that would train their employees. They would hire staff who had an entrepreneurial mindset and not that of an employee.

Order thru Twitter

After all, they called their second rung staff FERs, short for Faaso’s Entrepreneurs in Residence. You can order over Twitter – the first, says Jaydeep, to introduce such a facility. Even your complaints – delayed delivery or a wrong wrap – are redressed almost immediately. “This creates a discussion in an extremely viral medium,” says Jaydeep.

Initially, they roped in cooks from the famed roadside eateries of Kolkata that specialise in rolls. Faaso’s started off with a few wraps – chicken, mutton, vegetable and panneer – but now offers 33 varieties of wraps, constantly bringing in new fillings and taking out some that are not so hot with customers.

“We have innovated tremendously,” says Jaydeep. Like a sizzling panneer wrap or a cheesy corn salsa wrap. “Last year, we hired a chef who could take innovation to a different level,” says Jaydeep. This chef had worked in various hotels, including the Taj group. His contribution has been to have a central commissary and put in place systems.

When they were looking to hire staff, they decided to advertise in IIM Jobs that they are looking to hire people below 27 years of age, with preferably an MBA and with no experience in the foods business but will have to run a fast-food outlets.

They had about 1,000 applications out of which they hired three – two were with Vodafone and the third with Hindustan Unilever. One was given the task of running the Mumbai operations, another the Pune one and the third the job of drawing up a mechanism to train 100-200 people every month.

Wrap-ology varsity

The University of Wrap-ology, says Jaydeep, trains employees to run an outlet, interact with customers, prepare a wrap, look at financials and read accounts and what not. The idea is to make store managers entrepreneurs as well. Faaso’s believes that it will be difficult to retain staff by merely paying them high salaries. That is why it wants to make the work challenging and exciting.

Faaso’s outlets are typically about 200- 400 sq ft. At best, they can seat 10 people at a time. The business model itself is different. Nearly 60 per cent of its orders are for home delivery and the balance equally divided between take-away and dine-in. This may vary from outlet to outlet. This is what gives Faaso’s the capital efficiency that is built into its business model. Each outlet costs Rs 10-12 lakh to set up. Nearly 95 per cent of the outlets pay back the capital expenditure within one year. The company is not making profits, but the outlets are, says Jaydeep.

Faaso’s serves about 300 wraps an outlet daily and the average customer spend in each outlet is Rs 200.

Jaydeep is from Kolkata and you ask why there are no plans to open outlets in his home town. “You won’t get a Pizza Hut in Italy. Got that? Because Kolkata is the birth place of rolls,” he replies.

His main challenge going forward is in getting the right kind of employees – with an entrepreneurial mindset – and training them to retain that outlook to doing business. The other challenge, he says, is that India is a heterogenous market and to serve wraps that appeal to the palate in each city.

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