Being a Delhi School of Economics master’s degree with a very sorted corporate consulting job in one of the leading international consulting firms didn’t stop Anjali Midha of Kitchen Roast, from following her passion for food and hospitality services. Once she decided to give wings to her entrepreneurial aspirations, Midha first decided to learn and polish her cooking skills at one of the renowned catering colleges of the world, Le Cordon Bleu in London. While in the campus, she worked part time in kitchens of reputed fine dining restaurants in London and learnt both cooking as well as the business of food. While she got a very good exposure about the working of a restaurant kitchen, she decided once and for all that she would not set up a fine dining restaurant in life as it is all about set menu and have stereotypical operations.
“In a catering business, each day is different. You curate a new menu every day and combine it with the hospitality services, you deliver experiences to your customers,” Midha said.
However, she also admits the investment side as well, which made her look at catering as a chosen path. “Catering business is of course operational heavy. But restaurants are capital heavy,” she observed.
The journey has not been very easy for Midha although business-wise she has done quite well as “house-party culture” in Mumbai has picked up steam after the Covid19 pandemic. The middle and upper middle classes are aspiring for newer and newer food experiences and there are not many boutique caterers who are equipped to curate such experiences around food, she said.
“We are not super premium in that sense, but, of course, aspirational for those who value good food,” she added.
At the same time, the catering business is operationally challenging as there are so many uncertainties in the business. Because of these uncertainties, it is difficult to operate with a big team which would make business costs heavy and non-sustainable in the long run, she says.
Midha has the bandwidth to cater to medium-scale events of 200 people currently and she believes firmly that business will flow if she builds the team as new verticals of business like special occasion catering, gifting, etc. are picking up steam in the market.
“I have expanded my team recently. There is enough and more business in the market and it will follow as you scale up your team,” she said.
She has developed a robust community of ecosystem players like chefs, crockery-cutlery providers, part-time service staff, etc. to support her business as per the requirement.
“We never had expert chefs for dim sum and sushi. I reached out to chefs with expertise through instagram and they came to our kitchen and trained my chef for a month. Now we do it ourselves. Upskilling is important to avoid dependency,” she said.
As a boutique catering company, Midha wants to create her own niche in the market and therefore refrain from going piggy-back with big players and their events.
“I am not in the business to make a lot of money. There are 99 other businesses one can consider for that. My goal is to build my brand and in the process help other boutique suppliers,” she said.
In a business which is quite unorganised and fragmented, Midha believes that people like her with corporate background could help in bringing some sort of structure and systems into the catering business, thereby exposing the segment to potential investors to look at as an investible category.
“Today, the books of many of these players are not clean and their business is not structured. Therefore, investors don’t look at it as a lucrative business to invest in. Once players like us demonstrate a scalable model and present our success stories, investors will automatically follow,” she stated.
