Sukhpreet Singh Sial is Chetan Pal’s friend. Both have their factories in the Ramtekdi area. Roll Mania has its office about 200 m from our home on SB road.  Prasanna and Yours Truly dropped in for a chat on Sat, 9-Nov-24. My first roll was consumed during my Calcutta days – I think my favourite used to be the egg roll. The advantage of the egg roll was that the roti and the egg were well bonded – and would not fall out even if you inverted the roll. We started by hogging on rolls – Prasanna took the chicken one, and I got a vegan one – mushroom and potato. I managed to do some spilling over of the mushroom. The food quality is reasonable – it fills your stomach. And it is made without preservatives. 

The company started in 2010 – and has 110 outlets today. 10 are company owned, the rest are franchised. The ingredients are all prepared in the central kitchen – with the parathas cooked about 10%. I narrated my sandwich experience at Austin, where we ticked our fillings and sauces options on a brown envelope, which served as the instruction note for the assembly line. Sukhpreet’s partner, his brother Gagan, was not impressed. The big attraction for the US outlet would have been reduced labor costs, which in India is not a big worry area. The challenge with the food QSR industry is that there are only 4 business hours in the day – 2 for lunch, and 2 for dinner. So they believe that fast turnarounds help – the roll is a quintessential take-away product. (Must find out what the dine-in percentage is, next time I meet Sukhpreet.)

In the QSR business health does not sell. The chicken roll is the best seller. It is basically, taste – so you need the oil, the spice, the salt and the sugar. For any business, increase in same store sales is the real way to growth. I wonder what R Mania can do for that. Product diversification should be limited to rolls. They do sell beverages – but I guess you should not push the range beyond that. Is the roll a snack or a main meal? I still think of it as a snack – and we have seen a big movement of smaller sizes in the snack business worldwide. One experiment that R Mania should look at – is launching smaller sized rolls. Possible that the frequency of consumption may increase as a result. 

Transportation is the big challenge that R Mania has. They have a factory in Delhi – and the plan is to supply to newly launched outlets in Guwahati from there. All of R Mania products are deep freezed at the factory. So the cold chain needs to be maintained right till the time that the roll gets consumed. In addition to transportation, one also needs to take care of power outages – and gensets to keep the freezers running. We discussed how an entrepreneur can consolidate cold chain customers and book a refrigerated customer on ConCor Trains to reduce travel time. But the more attractive option seems to be distributed manufacturing. Purchase can continue to be centralised. The likes of Godrej and Venky’s already have cold-chains reaching out to most locations that R Maia is present in.  We can pass on transportation and holding costs to vendors like them. Have a container factory – which can be shipped and installed in a matter of weeks. What is important in distributed manufacturing is quality. Sukhpreet will have to have robust training and supervision of his quality team.

One hypothesis that I want to check is the customer segments. I guess that most customers would be young. Prasanna mentioned that his son, who studied at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan next door,  would have got a frequent flyer equivalent badge from the Rolls Mania outlet, which is next to Sukhpreet’s office. Discussion shifted to Subway – and how its bland test attracts only the middle aged upper middle class customer. Would the middle aged move towards rolls? I guess the only possibility is when they have healthier options. Chetan is not marketing his tofu well – otherwise we should have had that option coming. Definitely a pilot is required. Have invited Sukhpreet to have dinner with us at home in Dec. Hope he gets a tofu roll along!