This Start-up Aims at Becoming McDonald's for Healthy Food
This Start-up Aims at Becoming McDonald's for Healthy Food

A salad a week does not make a diet. Healthy eating is effective only if it is made a habit. And the key to making this easy is to make healthy food as exciting and interesting as food that we like to binge on. The concept of Purplebasil of healthful fast food does just that. “Essentially, our proprietary recipes use alternative ingredients to replicate the tastes and texture of fast food dishes, thus make them superbly healthy while retaining the deliciousness quotient,” shared Dhananjai Raja Kuttikad. Excerpts from the interview:

The Idea

A couple of years ago, my wife Rashmi and I decided to make a lifestyle change and start eating healthy. We soon found out there was a dearth of credible service providers who were genuinely focusing on all-round nutrition. More importantly, ‘healthy food’ in the market was terribly boring and bland, making it difficult for anyone to take up healthy eating on a regular basis. We wanted to change that. We wanted to make healthy eating interesting. That’s how we hit upon our concept of really healthy food that tastes like fast food! Our vision essentially is to help make healthy eating, an easy, convenient habit for our customers. In the long run, we plan to be like a McD for healthy food. 

Venturing into New Markets

All market predictions by analysts about our segment are extremely encouraging and predict a high CAGR. This is mostly because our target group – age groups of 25 – 45 – are a generation that are increasingly turning health conscious and making informed choices around the food they eat. While Mumbai and Hyderabad are extremely high potential markets that we are expanding too soon, we are also betting big on mid tier cities in India.

Eyeing Franchise Expansion

Right from day one, given our moon shot of becoming the McD for healthy food, we have prepped to make our business more process dependent and less chef dependent. This means extensive documentation and standardization around recipes, trainings, etc. Our proprietary Kitchen Symphony process eases our ops and makes it a scalable and repeatable model.

Binging on Healthy Options

We have over 60 documented recipes in our recipe book covering cuisines from all over the world – from European to Mexican to Middle Eastern to American to Indian. Our online model presents a limited number of these to our target group in a daily changing menu format. For our diner model franchise (directed towards tier 2 cities), we have a fixed menu format – 80% of the menu usually comes from our existing recipes. The remaining 20% we will develop new recipes based on cuisines that are local to the specific city/area and present them in a style a-la purplebasil.

Getting the Fair Deal

Average order value and ticket size for our online model is between 300 and 400. In our diner model franchise, cost for two would be anywhere between 700 and 1000 depending on the city.

Expansion Plans

In the next three years, we hope to be in at least two countries. In the next ten years, we hope to be the world’s most loved fast food brand for the healthy foodie.

 
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