Jaydeep Barman’s on a (Kolkata chicken) roll that won’t ever stop

What were your early days as a professional like? How did entrepreneurship happen?

Like a million people in India, I am an engineer and an MBA and I was in consulting before starting what we now know as Rebel Foods. I was with McKinsey after my business school in London. My daughter was just a couple of years old, and both my wife and I were thinking about where to raise her. That got me to take a sabbatical and come back to India and see what I can do here. And then Rebel Foods happened and I never went back to McKinsey after my sabbatical.

How did you zero down on food as a category?

I am a Bengali. I was born and grew up in Kolkata, where I would say my earlier life was mostly around football and food. Within food, I was totally in love with the Kolkata chicken rolls and the egg rolls. Every nook and cranny of Kolkata would have those. When I started travelling across India and then eventually across the world, I was always missing that.

Then I saw the growth of burgers and pizzas. If you think about fast food, a common element is the base or a wrapper and a filling or a topping. Pizza is a topping on a base. Burger is a filling within two pieces of bread. And if you think about chicken rolls or egg rolls, they are very similar. You have a wrapper and a filling.

So my founder and I were wondering why there wasn’t a chicken roll equivalent in fast food? Why was it not world-famous and why didn’t India have food brands at a national scale? Even today, there are five food brands that are in more than 500 locations, and all of those are imported. We were the first ones to get there, I guess, from India.

We were really passionate about food, chicken rolls especially, and that’s how our first brand, Faasos, came about. Then one thing led to another.

How did you fund the business on day 1?

The real start of Faasos was when I was doing my first job back in 2003 in Pune. We put a hole-in-the-wall, recruited a cook from Kolkata, and started. It was not our livelihood. But we started like that, and then we went on to business school, and then jobs. Came back, and then saw that little hole-in-the-wall was doing okay. Customers were loving it. So we thought, let’s pick it from there and try to make something out of it.

Initially, it was all bootstrapped from friends and family. My first investor was Anand (Lunia), who was my first boss back in the day. Then his dad also invested some money into us. And then, around 2011 or 2012, our first institutional investor came, which was Sequoia Capital (now renamed Peak XV Partners).

How did you manage to convince Sequoia to invest?

I had a choice between Sequoia and another term sheet. I remember writing a one pager to GV (Ravishankar), who was from Sequoia, describing our business and why I believed that it could be a game-changer. People say that to get VC money you have to do networking, you have to go to conferences, you need to know a lot of people. But it was just an email from me to GV, nothing more than that. And GV replied within a day, and then we got talking, and they felt that it’s worth investing in.

What was your vision when you started Faasos? Did you make iterations to your plans and vision?

It looks totally different now from back when we started Faasos. We put this small format of high street stores. If I have to sort of condense the journey of the last 12 years, there were like three lightbulb moments in our journey.

The first one was around 2014 when we realised that in India the rental costs for high street were the highest in the world when you compare to the sales of that unit. Our rental costs were off the charts, not making money, etc., but then delivery was coming up, and more and more people were getting food delivered to their doorsteps. So we had this lightbulb moment: why don’t we put a delivery-only kitchen from a first floor back alley… and see what happens. And that worked. Our delivery sales kept increasing, we could afford a larger space, and that’s how the real journey of Rebel Foods started.

Lightbulb moment No. 2 was around 2016 when we launched pizzas under Faasos. People didn’t buy it because–we realised after talking to customers–they thought Faasos was for rolls or wraps, not for pizza. They didn’t believe Faasos could make great pizzas. So we launched a different brand for pizzas, and that started working. That was the second lightbulb moment: that people are looking for different options but they are always looking for a brand that is known for that particular option, like Starbucks is for coffee, McDonald’s is for burgers, etc.

The third lightbulb moment we had was that we had a kitchen that doesn’t have a storefront, so nobody can say it’s Faasos or whatever, and from that kitchen we can actually launch more brands. So over time Behrouz Biryani came, Oven Story Pizza came, Sweet Truth and Lunch Box came, among others. We now also have the licence to run Wendy’s–the world’s second-largest burger brand–on our platform.

Many founders struggle with identifying their total addressable market. How did you figure out yours?

We realised one thing very early on in our journey–that people are not segments. In cars, people either drive a Mercedes or a Maruti, not at the same time. Hardly anybody will drive a Mercedes in the evening and a Maruti in the morning.

But if you think about food, if you and I go to a chai tapri (tea stall) and have a ₹20 chai, we also go to a fine-dine restaurant for meetings. On weekdays, we want to have a ₹150 quick meal, and splurge on a weekend when friends and family are over.

So we realised that in our business, actually the same person moves between different use cases. So our TAM is actually massive because we run a platform.

How do you plan to grow each of these brands?

There has been a journey of discovering pockets of opportunities in India. There are a couple of instances. One is geographical. I was born in Kolkata and my first job was in Siliguri (north of Bengal), where I used to sell TVs. I remember I sold a TV in a dealership where electricity was not there. So that was like folklore in my company at that time, which was 20 years back. Today, some of our biggest per-unit sales are happening in tier 2 and 3 cities.

We are in 75 cities and we are just scratching the surface. China has 35 times more restaurants per capita than India… India is the most under-penetrated country in the world, and within that 60-70% is unorganised.

When we enter Coimbatore, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Trichy or Mangalore, we see massive demand and our average order value is $5, or about ₹400. Can you imagine any middle class family–which is a couple of 100 million people across all these cities–affording a ₹400 meal on a weekly basis?

I am seeing the depth of the market first-hand as an entrepreneur as our business grows. There are a lot of people who say the Indian consumer class is 10 million or 20 million. I don’t agree because my knowledge is not theoretical. My knowledge is practical. When we enter cities, we see it happening with our brands day in, day out.

We believe today there are 300 to 400 cities in India where our business would be viable, and we are only in 75 cities. We have about six brands today that are more than ₹100 crore and all of them are growing at a fast clip. So that’s the geographical sort of opportunity in India.

The other piece is, I am a Bengali and I grew up being a hardcore non-vegetarian. Over the last 10 years, I have realised how diverse the food culture in India is. I never knew there were two Navaratris in India when 70% of India becomes vegetarian. I never knew there was something called Shravan in Maharashtra and in the North. There is Onam and Pongal, and all these are tremendous opportunities to launch new products and offerings at scale.

Today, we have a Navratri thali that is available across 75 cities. During Ramadan we launch haleem. On Valentine’s Day we launch a heart-shaped pizza, or a Sweet Truth desert. For Christmas we launch a plum cake, and on Onam, we launch an Onam thali.

We can meet the customer with terrific offerings that they would love and that’s an immense opportunity, and almost limitless. It’s just that food is always present and is relevant. Whatever be the occasion.

Can you tell us a little bit about your global expansion strategy?

Today we are outside India in two geographies. One is the UAE, and we just started our Saudi Arabia operation. We are also in the UK.

When we entered the UAE, there were a lot of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and subcontinent population. We have been there for three years now. Our largest brand there is the health brand, our second-largest brand is an Asian brand, and the third-largest brand is a bowl brand. Behrouz is our fourth-largest brand in the UAE.

Because we have created a platform on which we can create brands relevant to the demographic of a location, we believe we would be able to create brands wherever we go in the world.

If you had to start all over again, what pitfalls would you avoid? And what lessons have you learned?

Our learnings came along the way; it’s all in hindsight. For example, we might have started with a kitchen. But if you look at it, we started a kitchen as a learning after we made a mistake. That mistake that led us down a different path. That mistake taught us valuable lessons.

One thing I can tell you, it is very hard. I am not sure if the journey would be different if we started again, or if I would even choose to be an entrepreneur knowing how hard it would be. That’s my honest admission.

Looking back at the hardships we faced, I never experienced a situation with no food on the table. However, there were times when I struggled to pay my daughter’s school fees, which is more of a middle-class problem rather than one of extreme poverty. I can’t even imagine what life would be like at that level. My team and I faced our fair share of struggles. Maybe if I had known that I would have to go through all that I might not have even started.

However, looking back and putting things in perspective, it all worked out in the end.

One thing I would suggest is to focus on growing more slowly at the start until you figure out the real growth engine, or flywheel, as described in Jim Collins’ book (Turning the Flywheel). Back then, we may have overreached before establishing our business’s flywheel.

My advice to entrepreneurs, including myself, would be to prioritise understanding and perfecting this growth engine before scaling, even if it means making new mistakes along the way. Over time, the flywheel starts moving on its own.

For us, a stronger operating system allows us to bring in more brands, attract more customers, and gain insights to further strengthen the system. This is the flywheel I am referring to. We overreached before fully understanding this flywheel.

My key learning is that every business has its own flywheel, and it’s crucial to understand and perfect it before scaling.

You touched upon a very important aspect in a founder’s life–family. How supportive were they of your decision?

My parents were teachers and my father was very entrepreneurial from the beginning. Despite being a professor, he started his own mushroom farm. Though it failed, he never shied away from trying new things. In fact, when we started our first hole-in-the-wall outlet in Pune, my father actually stood in front of some of the roll joints in Kolkata and identified a cook.

I think it was more difficult for my wife and my daughter. Though my wife has been a rock support for me. (In) London, we used to have a big house with a garden at the back, and my daughter used to go to a private school. It sort of went from there to here. I don’t remember any time they craved (that lifestyle) although it was not a piece of cake. So I have been very lucky with my parents, my wife, and their support throughout these years.

How important is spirituality, because you need to find some strength within to get through some dark days?

I would say two sources. I was a mountaineer when I was younger. But over the last five years, I have made it a point to go away to the mountains once a year. This March I was in Patagonia in Chile. I have made it a point that every year I would go away for 15 to 20 days and be in the mountains. And that has been a game-changer for me. It’s meditative. It’s physical work.

And what happens is because I have to go for a climb or a trek once a year, I am practising throughout the year. So six days a week I am running in the morning and doing some strength exercise.

When we put these two things together, it has brought a certain amount of calmness in my life, like the morning run. It’s almost meditative for me.

What’s the endgame for Rebel Foods? What are the plans?

There is no endgame because I think we are drawing on an infinite canvas. It might sound far-fetched. It might sound like the guy is talking through his nose. But if you really think about a business, we have an operating system on top of which we can create brands. This can go on forever.

Fifty years down the line, someone else would be managing Rebel and there will be a different team, but a new food trend will come and we will still be relevant. Unlike a one-brand company, we don’t have a shelf-life. We can keep doing it as long as people are eating.