Tips On How to Maintain Consistency, Discipline & Flavors Across a Restaurant Chain BIZ Experiences India spoke to Ashish Saxena is currently leading investments of TVS Capital in the food and beverage space. Ashish is the CEO for TexMex Cuisine which own and operates Chili's American Grill & Bar in West and South India.

The ideal restaurant franchise formulae is having a consistency is services and ambience across all the brands outlets.

BIZ Experiences India spoke to Ashish Saxena is currently leading investments of TVS Capital in the food and beverage space. Ashish is the CEO for TexMex Cuisine which own and operates Chili's American Grill & Bar in West and South India.

Maintaining Consistency Across Restaurant Franchises

The brand has standardized the processes for everything, whether there is a process for cooking, building food alignment or standard presentation. All these aids are available to the team in the kitchen and this helps us work smoothly in a tough market where training and retaining quality manpower is a big challenge, Ashish said. Second thing that plays an important role is the kitchen equipment that we use

The Chili's business has grown 3 fold in sales over the past two years through a mix of strong same store growth and opening of 3 new stores, the company said. Ashish is also actively supporting TVS Capital for opportunities to invest further in this sector.

Selecting a restaurant location

For us, 70 percent of our sale comes from food, therefore we look for places where there is a natural footfall that already exists. If you have footfall existing in that place then it becomes easier for people to come across and try our menu and start developing a taste for it. We are not a destination fine dine, hence we can't get people to come all the way to dine at our outlets. We love being in malls, high streets, where we know that there is going to be crowd flow.

Secondly, we are a brand where people would like to come in and out frequently. Hence access has to very smooth, it cannot be a second floor or a third floor of a building. We like to be on the ground floor with the frontage where we would like to show the brand and invite a person in, that is something which is ingrained in our DNA, Ashish said.

Innovation amidst competition splurge

Innovation is always about discipline. People misconstrue innovation to be some creative people sitting together to do something new. We redo our menu every quarter and that requires some amount of discipline, Ashish said.

Ashish was one of the panellists at the Restaurant India Show held in Bangalore on Dec 18.