Mayank Gupta and Lalit Jhawar, both 35 and founders of gourmet retail chain Food Square, love talking to teenagers and young adults when deciding on the assortment for their stores.
“Gen Zers are the most aware in terms of trends in food and fashion today thanks to social media. They influence their family members as well as others in a big way. It is hard to escape them and also much to learn from them,” Gupta says.
This simple insight is helping the young founders, Gupta an IIT Bombay graduate and Jhawar from Kingston University in UK, to fill the space vacated by Foodhall, the gourmet retail chain started by Kishore Biyani’s daughters in 2011. Foodhall closed in 2023 after debt-laden Future Retail was dragged to the National Company Law Tribunal by lenders.
Ironically, Food Square’s 25,000-sq ft Santacruz store, launched in November 2023, was earlier occupied by Foodhall. Gupta admits that he and his partner have big shoes to fill, since the comparison with its predecessor is inevitable. Almost 90-95% of Food Square’s products are imported and around 5-10% are sourced from Indian suppliers. Food Square’s second store is located in Worli.
The Biyani sisters, meanwhile, have launched Food Stories, a gourmet food retail store in Delhi earlier this year, following Foodhall’s closure. Food Stories will soon have competition from Gupta and Jhawar’s brand as they plans to expand to Delhi by mid-next year and Gurgaon by Diwali next year. The retailer will also tap cities such as Hyderabad and Bengaluru as part of a broader expansion strategy in the country.
The products available at Food Square include high-end cheese to bread, wine to coffee, fruits, vegetables, meat and seafood as well as a section for high-end home and personal care products. Jhawar and Gupta also run a farming business Landcraft Agro, supplying fresh vegetables and fruits to over 200 supermarkets and gourmet stores across the west and south of India. Some of its produce also finds its way into Food Square, which is owned by sister concern Landcraft Retail. The latter has raised two rounds of funding from high net worth individuals so far, with plans for a third round shortly to fund the expansion.
The retail plan, as Jhawar says, is to have about 12-15 stores in the next two years, using a hub-and-spoke model, that is, setting up a large flagship store in a city followed by smaller satellite stores around it. Mumbai will likely have one more outlet, in Powai, to tap the affluent in the eastern suburbs of Mumbai, as the chain grows its footprint.
Meanwhile, Food Square’s Santacruz property, Gupta says, already has a revenue run rate of about Rs 72 crore annually, while the Worli store, which is around 5,000 sq ft in size and was launched in September this year, is doing about Rs 18-20 crore annually. Retail industry sources say that these are decent revenue numbers given that margins in luxury food products are high versus regular food products where the focus is on driving volume sales.
“The revenue run rate gives us an indication that there is a growing base of affluent people in the country who want the best in terms of food products. We are catering to that community with a combination of assortment, service and location. Our unique selling proposition is that we source products that are hard to get elsewhere, whether on e-commerce, quick commerce or other gourmet retail outlets,” Jhawar says.
Some of the other notable incumbents in gourmet food retail besides Food Square and Food Stories includes Artisan Pantry, launched by the Kolkata-based RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group under its Nature’s Basket chain of stores. Artisan Pantry has a presence in Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru, with plans to enter more cities in the future.