Market entry strategy for an Indian QSR chain

Abstract

Almost in all the major cities in India, we find certain global food chains such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Burger King etc., which offer consistent food quality and taste across all the outlets. One key feature of these global brands is that they offer cuisines of their own countries by adapting them to local taste. For instance, McDonald’s serves vegetarian burgers in India in many variants, but they hardly offer any vegetarian choice in the USA. Even though south Indian delicacies are famous in all parts of the country, we don’t see any Indian brand (especially the one serving south Indian fast food such as Idli) at the scale of, say Pizza Hut. There are some brands such as Saravana Bhavan that offer South Indian food, but they are regionally confined to a few states. This gap between the existing appeal for the cuisine and absence of a strong brand to cater to this gap is what we would like to explore. We want to start off with exploring the barriers to the industry and the challenges before local brands to scale nationwide. The end goal will be to come up with a market entry/scaleup strategy addressing the identified challenges for an aspiring local brand.