Cooking Up a Storm

By Shreyasi Singh

Reeta and Dheeraj Gupta cooked up a range of fusion fare with Jumbo King,
the fast food chain they co-founded in 2001.

They might have fallen in love over samosas and idli sambhar as students at Pune’s Symbiosis Centre of Management and Human Resources Development, but it is the humble vada pav, Mumbai’s ubiquitous street snack, which most definitely rules Dheeraj and Reeta Gupta’s life as a couple.

Adding a different dimension to the streetfood menu, this ambitious couple has cooked up a whole new range of fusion fare with Jumbo King, the fast food chain they co-founded in August 2001. Built around a single dish, vada pav, Jumbo King is a delectable success story that has taken a quintessentially Indian dish and given it a flavourable Western toss. Think McDonald’s and burgers. That’s what Jumbo King intends to do to the vada pav. While finishing her MBA in 1998, this wasn’t Reeta’s idea of a perfect career recipe. “I was keen to accept the best campus placement and settle down in a career,” she admits. She even worked briefly with Reliance and Cognizant Technology Solutions. But Dheeraj, who studied hotel management before entering B-school, wanted to do something in the food industry. He even started Manali Foods to increase the shelf life of the Indian mithai and make it more accessible to the budget buyer by packaging it in small quantities like chocolates. His family had been sweetmeat traders and somewhere he hoped he could leverage the knowledge that had been gleaned from experience.

It was during a visit to London in 2000 to study the market potential for Indian sweets exported from India to the UK that Dheeraj and Reeta stumbled upon the real “jumbo” idea. Staying with a friend, who ran multiple Burger King franchises in the city, Dheeraj had his Eureka moment. The self-confessed samosa freak hit upon the strong connection between the desi vada pav and the foreign burger—both quick, on-the-go people’s food. The two even looked similar, “a fried patty between two halves of bread”, he realised.

Most people would have left it at that, maybe recounting their brilliant idea ad nauseum to friends at dinner parties, but Dheeraj and Reeta followed through. They borrowed two lakh rupees from Dheeraj’s father and started Jumbo King with a single outlet at a local railway station in Malad in 2001.

The magic of the vada pav worked and Jumbo King mushroomed into 36 outlets in Mumbai alone. Another nine sprang up in Gujarat, run by franchisees. Together, these outlets dish up more than 35,000 vada pavs every day. This robust appetite for growth has ensured healthy turnovers, and Jumbo King ended this financial year with Rs 15 crore in revenue. Dheeraj, however, feels the potato hasn’t even been peeled yet. “Look at McDonald’s. It took Ray Crock 30 years to make McDonald’s such a giant. And, the brand still continues to grow with a simple product like a burger. We’ll do that to vada pav,” says the ambitious owner. Last year, Jumbo King sold equity to raise funds. Dheeraj is unwilling to disclose more, since the company’s “looking at a larger round of funding soon”. He admits that they are cash flow positive and the capital will be used exclusively to fund growth. “We have realised that 35 per cent is a healthy rate to grow annually in this business. Over the past five years, we have averaged 26 per cent growth. So, the challenges remain.” The plan, he adds, is to take Jumbo King to 100 outlets in Mumbai in the next three years.

More than the numbers though, it is the glamorous new avatar of the vada pav that is more interesting. Dheeraj and Reeta have spiced up the simple Mumbaikar snack into a fare that is now being considered even by the uppity foodie class. A lot of that also has to do with the smart marketing done around the product. Reeta, who handled marketing, public relations and branding for the company, roped in celebrities and organised fun events to give the snack an upmarket buzz. August 23, the day their first outlet went live, is celebrated every year as the Vada Pav Day. Dheeraj credits Reeta with being gifted with such big and brilliant ideas, saying that he is more driven by processes and systems.

Reeta agrees she might have helped build the “brand” but she is definitely not the master chef. “The product is the hero. And, the person who works on the business, on creating that product, always has the upper hand. In our case, that’s Dheeraj.”

Between ensuring that customers go away licking their fingers, how tough is it to make sure that the marriage does not lose its flavour, sandwiched as it must be between professional compulsions and personal responsibilities? Reeta believes that things aren’t as dramatic. “You need to reason things out. Many a times, I would just give in because he was much more involved in the different phases that the company went through,” she recalls, adding that she took a backseat while having their children, nine-year-old Neha and five-year-old Karan.

Now, in fact, she has exited from daily operations of Jumbo King. In 2007, she set up Wow Factor Communications, a firm specialising in PR and brand communications, although she continues to be on the Jumbo King board and is involved in all crucial strategy decisions. She confesses she doesn’t “miss” having Dheeraj at work, but only because his strength doesn’t lie in marketing.

Dheeraj says he’s used to having to fall in line. “The wife always wins. Reeta would beat me hands down in debates at college, and she still beats me. Not much has changed that way,” he laughs. More seriously, Reeta says what worked for them was the strict definition of their spaces and responsibilities. “If lines get blurred, you spend too much time deciding on the same thing. Often then, a work argument gets stretched and there is a problem,” agrees Dheeraj, saying while he was “busy buying bread, potatoes and frying oil”, Reeta perfected her marketing flourishes. He credits learning this lesson at his home where his Marwari businessman father encouraged his brother and him to undertake two different entrepreneurial journeys. “As husband and wife, too, there is a certain point in which you need to build those boundaries.”

Reeta argues that while terms such as equal ownership, coinvestors and shared goals sound great, it’s better to have a single boss. “You need to be honest within your marriage and at work. At some point, you have to tell each other, your job is to run the company and I will manage the marriage.”

“I am the boss at home; I run it,” she adds. Dheeraj’s long work hours anyways do not enable him to be around all the time; although, he is very, very particular about some things like “unsupervised, solitary television viewing for the children”.

Altogether, the recipe seems to work perfectly.

	EMAIL THIS ARTICLE	PRINT THIS PAGE