Bengaluru’s popular street food restaurant, Yumlok, has earmarked an aggressive growth trajectory for the year 2018. Currently, Yumlok has three outlets and one cloud kitchen and it plans to set up 50 stores by 2020.
Yumlok also plans to branch out of its home market and establish company owned restaurants and franchises in other parts of the country. Targeted at the youth, Yumlok specializes 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.
As founders of the company explains, continuous menu engineering is the most important thing for long term sustenance in restaurant business. Even in the upcoming restaurants, Yumlok intends to follow two philosophies in their menu – first is to serve Classic food, which will sell anytime of the year without any marketing; second, continuously innovate and improvise the food in aspects of aesthetic, organoleptic and packaging to bring back customers regularly.
Started off as an experiment in 2015, Yumlok has seen tremendous success. It is serving 10,000 plus orders per month with average order value of Rs 325, only with word of mouth publicity.
Avinash Gupta, Founder and CEO of Yumlok, says, “We started in 2015 when everyone wanted to buy in to the next big food-tech startup. A lot of food related startups were getting funded back then, most haven’t survived beyond 2016. Restaurants are a hard business with 18 hour of working, 365 days a year. It was never easy but a sharp focus on quality of food and service helped us get off-ground. Currently, all of our stores are 4 star plus rated across all major food search platforms (Zomato, Swiggy, Magic Pin etc.). Our stores are also one of the highest order generators in online ordering platforms like Zomato online ordering and Swiggy.”
Yumlok is planning to open their fourth store in Bengaluru soon at Harlur Road. As per their projections, a city like Bengaluru can easily accommodate about 50 Yumlok and they have also identified 5 other cities in India, which have a sizeable immigrant population.
The company is eyeing to grow on average 60 per cent YoY in terms of stores and establishing 100 stores in about 5 years.
