Bengaluru’s street food restaurant chain, Yumlok, which currently operates a cloud kitchen and three outlets, has earmarked an aggressive growth trajectory for the year 2018 and plans to set up 50 outlets by 2020.
It also plans to branch out of its home market and establish company-owned restaurants and franchises in other parts of India.
Targeted at the youth, Yumlok specialises in serving North Indian meal combos, Delhi-style chaats, and some Indo-Western fusion dishes that are a blend of western recipes with Indian spices.
The founders of the company explained that continuous menu engineering was the most important thing for long-term sustenance in the restaurant business.
Even in the upcoming restaurants, Yumlok intends to follow two philosophies in their menu – the first is to serve classic food, which will sell anytime of the year without any marketing, and the second is to continuously innovate and improvise the food in the aspects of aesthetic, organoleptic and packaging to bring back customers regularly.
It started off as an experiment in 2015, and has seen tremendous success since. It gets over 10,000 orders per month with an average order value of Rs 325, only through word-of-mouth publicity.
Avinash Gupta, founder and chief executive officer, Yumlok, said, “We started in 2015 when everyone wanted to buy into the next big food tech start-up.”
“A lot of food related start-ups were getting funded back then. Most haven’t survived beyond 2016,” he added.
“Restaurants is a hard business with 18 hours of work, 365 days a year. It was never easy, but a sharp focus on the quality of the food and service helped us get off-ground,” Gupta said.
“Currently, all our stores are four-star-plus rated on all major food search platforms, including Zomato, Swiggy and Magic Pin. They are also one of the highest order generators on online ordering platforms like Zomato and Swiggy,” he added.
Yumlok is planning to open its fourth store at Harlur Road in Bengaluru shortly. As per their projections, a city like the Karnataka capital can easily accommodate about 50 Yumlok outlets.