South India's foodservice giants honoured at 10th Annual Coca-Cola Golden Spoon Awards

The 10th Annual Coca Cola Golden Spoon Awards powered by India Gate Basmati Rice has honoured three of South India’s foodservice retail giants for excellence in retail innovation and customer service.
All three honorees are as highly renowned and revered for their business success as for their charitable and social responsibility initiatives.
Heads of traditional, and immensely successful, food service business giants from South India – including K.T. Srinivasa Raja, Managing Director, Adyar Ananda Bhavan (AAB), Murali Mahadevan, Managing Director, Sri Krishna Sweets and M Mahadevan, Chairman & Director, Oriental Cuisines / Hot Breads  – were felicitated on February 1st at a glittering ceremony attended by the who’s who of India’s food retail and foodservice industries at the Sofitel Hotel in Mumbai.
K.T. Srinivasa Raja is among the pioneers in the field of traditional sweets and has for long been working toward preserving a unique tradition while constantly reinventing the menu to meet the evolving tastes of the new generation global Indians.
His enterprise has 100 branches in India and is now expanding globally to meet the needs of Indians living abroad. His professional aim is to make high-quality, specialty South Indian food available all over the world, while his personal aim is to provide high quality, innovative food to all people at all times!
His ambition to reach the pinnacle of glory and his enthusiasm to do more and more in the food industry made him start chain of restaurants in name and style of A2B, AAB Bakery, Icecreamcome from the stable of Adyar Ananda Bhavan as their sister concerns.
Murali Mahadevan is the Managing Director of the immensely popular Sri Krishna Sweets, which was founded in 1948 by Shri N K Mahadeva Iyer in Coimbatore, with a mission to serve the public with a professional catering house.
He built the Mysurpa as a very popular and powerful brand, a flagship product and the single monumental contribution to the food processing industry.
Meticulously grown over the last six decades, today SKS is synonymous with superb taste, high quality and very good value food products.
The visionary drive in Murali led to the launch of the iconic karas in the SKS menu. Today SKS serves 75 varieties of Karaa and each stands out in its unique way. Murali extended his expertise of quality and fresh thinking beyond retailing sweets and karas among other products. To bond with customers even deeper, expanding into wholesome vegetarian food was his next visionary act.
Sri Krishna Bhavan was launched at select SKS outlets. These high class pure vegetarian restaurants serve pan Indian food with periodic theme oriented food melas for the food connoisseur.
M Mahadevan, Chairman & Director, Oriental Cuisines / Hot Breads, is the change that he wished for the culinary scene in Chennai. His stand-alone restaurants are specific, artistic, hygienic and the food unparalleled! The award was received by CEO, Oriental Cuisines Pvt. Ltd. Reynold Fernandes (in picture), received award on behalf of M Mahadevan, Chairman & Director,Oriental Cuisines / Hot Breads.
Deliberately, he has eschewed the familiar cookie-cutter mentality of fast food chains and chose to open multiple brands of speciality restaurants. Today, he has 252 partners across 18 countries and has a finger in the pie of 476 eateries across the globe.
Under the umbrella of Oriental Cuisines Pvt Ltd, he has 14 fine dining restaurants serving delectable food for the soul in Thai, Japanese, Chinese & Indian style. 48 Quick Service restaurants – Wangs Kitchen & 68 bakeries carrying the brand name French Loaf, all of the above span the cities of Chennai, Bangalore & Kolkata in India.
In the span of 20 years he has opened with the help of like minded businessmen a grand total of 130 bakeries in 16 countries. The United States (New York & San Francisco), Ghana, France (Paris), UAE (Dubai), Botswana, Kuwait, Muscat, Singapore, Malaysia & the UK (London) & Australia (Sydney).
The Coca Cola Golden Spoon Awards 2017 honour India’s leading food & grocery retail and foodservice chains and innovations for business excellence across multiple categories in the year 2016.
The Awards ceremony was a key highlight of the 10th edition of India Food Forum held between Jan 31- Feb 2, 2017, at the Bandra Kurla Complex, in Mumbai. The forum is widely accepted as India’s largest food retail intelligence event.