On most days in Bengaluru, Bert Mueller could pass unnoticed, except for the auto, which is bright red and unmistakable. Mueller, an American who moved to India in his early 20s, often drives the three-wheeler around Indiranagar, where he lives. Gifted by co-founder Gaelan Draper when he exited the company, it is the only vehicle Mueller owns.
More than a decade after he first arrived in India as a student, Mueller, 36, is the co-founder and CEO of California Burrito, a quick-service restaurant chain set up in 2012 that serves burritos, tacos, burrito bowls and quesadillas in a build-your-meal format (choose your base, your protein and toppings). One of the country’s largest Mexican-inspired food chains, it has 130 outlets across Bengaluru, Chennai, the National Capital Region, Hyderabad and Pune, with plans to set foot in Mumbai this year.
For much of its first decade, California Burrito grew steadily on the back of a model the founders had decided on early in their journey: opening outlets in Bengaluru’s tech parks and serving office-goers looking for quick, cheap lunch options that were not too unfamiliar to the Indian palate. The format worked, and burrito bowls in particular became a hit—they resembled rice-based Indian meals, but with different flavours. By early 2020, the company had around 37 outlets.
Then came covid. “In March 2020, we were doing about ₹4 crore in sales a month,” Mueller says. “Then it dropped to about ₹25 lakh.” With offices shutting down, the very locations that had powered the business—tech parks and corporate hubs—became liabilities. “We went from full outlets to almost nothing,” he says.
Like most restaurant businesses, California Burrito pivoted to delivery, which accounted for the majority of revenue at one point. But Mueller, who was running the company on his own by then, his two co-founders having returned to the US (Gaelan Draper in 2014 and Dharam Khalsa in 2020), realised that the brand had been too dependent on a single type of customer. “Marketing was something we totally underinvested in,” Mueller says. “We didn’t really start spending on it until covid. ”
The company began opening standalone neighbourhood stores with a focus on dine-in, which had once been incidental. There was also a shift in the consumer profile in terms of the age demographic: today, California Burrito is a go-to for Gen Z and Alpha customers in metro cities. They show intense brand loyalty, often quite visibly on social media, and the food holds a comfort akin to home food for them.
Gen Z fandom was achieved through a mix of smartly planned new locations, pricing and branding/marketing. Post-covid, Mueller noticed that people with disposable income were often short of time, while younger consumers—students and young professionals—had more time and were willing to spend it eating out. The brand leaned into that.
Entry-level products like tacos and avocado tostadas became a way to draw first-time customers. “The path to younger people was through tacos. Taco Bell was already selling them, but we weren’t actually selling too many. So when we had our 10th year anniversary, we did a promotional event selling tacos at ₹10. From that, we built Taco Tuesday (tacos at ₹10 every Tuesday), which became very popular. We realised that we had to offer exceptional value to draw in this crowd and bring them to stores,” says Mueller.
By late 2021, the business had made its way back to pre-pandemic levels and started growing. Over the next couple of years, it expanded rapidly across cities, crossing the 100-store mark. Revenues climbed as well, with the company reporting an annual revenue of around ₹337 crore for 2024-25. Its latest funding round, ₹100-120 crore in Series B funding from Elevation Capital in September 2025, will be used to expand their retail footprint and operations across India, says Mueller.
Though it is seen as a Bengaluru brand today—with over 40 stores in the city—California Burrito’s inception happened in Jaipur. Mueller was studying music and public policy at College of William & Mary in Virginia, US when he came to India in 2010 for a semester-long study programme in Jaipur. It turned out to be a life-altering decision. “Somewhere in my head, I had a very positive image of India. I’d done a project on Hinduism at school, so I had that. I loved Indian food. I loved spicy food. I reasoned that a study abroad programme had to be the opposite of what my normal life was, so, what’s the opposite? Maybe China. India, they speak English, so it’d be easier to have a more fulfilling experience.”
While in Jaipur, a classmate from Mexico cooked a meal for the group and their host families one evening. “You could see that the Indians liked it. The flavours were different but not too startlingly different,” he says. The moment stayed with him. Soon after, at a wedding, he heard Shakira playing on the speakers and it struck him as another small point of overlap and an indicator of how universal pop culture had become. “At that time, I knew I wanted to come back to India in some way but I didn’t know how or to do what.”
Mueller returned to the US and walked into a Chipotle Mexican Grill outlet. “A third of the people in line were Indians,” he says. The random images and ideas in his head took on a pattern and a plan. Back at university, he petitioned to get into an advanced business class—despite being a music major—to write a business plan for what would eventually become California Burrito. He took a job at Moe’s Southwest Grill near his college in Williamsburg, Virginia to understand how fast-casual restaurants operated.
By the time he graduated, the decision had been made. He would move to India and try to build a Mexican food chain. In December 2011, Mueller arrived in Bengaluru with his two co-founders whom he had met at college and limited capital. Each put in about $15,000 from their savings. Family contributions added a little more. For the first six months, the founders lived in a shared paying-guest accommodation in Koramangala. “We were living within our means,” he says. “We decided that if we’re not doing any sales, we shouldn’t have many expenses.” Their early journey was documented on a Tumblr blog—three young Americans trying to build a burrito company in India—and possibly accounted for the early success of the brand because it was such a good story.
It wasn’t all easy though. Draper left within the first year (he later came back and was part of the company till 2014). What kept Mueller going was a kind of stubborn focus. “I’m very mission-oriented,” he says. “Like a heat-seeking missile. Once I’m locked in, I just have to go the whole way.” He traces some of this mindset to his family, especially his mother, who is a marathon runner.
Culturally, the reference for the kind of food Mueller wanted to serve in his restaurants came from his travels within the US. He grew up in Maryland, just outside Washington DC, and says he had great burritos in the city’s Mission District. “And then, Chipotle became a rage. They are inspired by Mexican food, but the format is different…the best way I can explain it is by saying it’s like what darshini hotels in Bangalore are to south Indian food,” says Mueller.
When he travelled to San Francisco in 2010, he found he loved the food served by taco trucks and tiny mom-and-pop restaurants run by Mexican immigrants to the city. “That’s how this new restaurant format was born—Mexican-inspired, has the assembly line, the burrito concept, you can see how everything is made—and then Chipotle came along and really popularised it, and then chains like Moe’s (which just entered India in NCR) and Qdoba. That was the evolution of the format, and I felt it would work in India. We didn’t feel the need to ‘Indianise’ the food—we add veg options, but we try and stick to the flavours that you would expect from this cuisine, so no McCurry Tikki and Paneer Tikki and all of that,” says Mueller, laughing.
The food scene in India has changed extensively since then, says Mueller, with the availability of a large variety of cuisines at different price points and improved supply chains. For a while, he was obsessed with getting the right kind of avocados for the chain after a visit to Mexico in 2018. “This was just after an inflexion point where I asked myself if I wanted to stay on or get out, and had decided that I was committing to this,” he recalls. Eating guacamole in Mexico was a humbling moment, with Mueller realising that the quality of what he was serving in India could be far better.
Back in India, his search for the perfect Hass avocados finally led to the company getting involved with growing avocados and tomatillos in Karnataka’s Kodagu (Coorg) district in partnership with organic produce chain Namdhari’s Fresh.
His own evolution as a leader has been gradual from being a founder to a CEO, he says. “The way I look at it is, a founder is a hunter and a CEO is a gatherer,” he says. “At some point, you have to stop hunting everywhere and start building something sustainable.” Part of that shift has come from learning how to build teams and culture in a country that he did not grow up in and that was, initially at least, culturally unfamiliar. It was not always intuitive in the early years, he says, and communication, in particular, required adjustment. “It was very hard for people to understand me and my co-founders at the beginning,” he says. “I changed the words I used and the way I pronounced things.”
More significantly, he had to soften a certain directness he associates with American work culture. “I’m very straight,” he says. “But sometimes that can be seen as hurtful. So how do you say the same thing without making it sound cutting?” While he adapted to local norms—becoming, by his own admission, “much more patient”—he also built a company that reflected his own instincts. “At the end of the day, there are 2,000 people in the company,” he says. “So I have to adjust. But I try to hire people who share some overlap with me.”
He also threw himself wholeheartedly into the local culture, scoping out all the best dosa and biryani joints and using social media, particularly Instagram, to share his food discoveries and adventures.
Despite the growth, Mueller has resisted moving into a more upmarket category, where Spanish-Mexican cuisine is having a moment with more and more upscale restaurants, from cantinas to tequila bars, opening up. “I’m not a fancy guy,” he says. “Our DNA is mass.”
Shrabonti Bagchi (@shrabonti) is a Bengaluru-based writer.