N Supermarkets, which currently has five stores in operation across south India, has signed up seven more locations in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. “We have also appointed a master franchisee in Chennai with the mandate to open 20 stores in three years’ time in the city,” C Gopalakrishnan, Chairman, B N Dairy Farms Pvt Ltd, informed Indiaretailing.
Gopalakrishnan’s modus operandi to appoint and nurture franchisees is based on his strong belief in an ‘investor-operator’ model. “I firmly believed at Nilgiri’s — and still do — that a food/ grocery retail business in India cannot be left to external professionals. By its very nature, it demands that the investor be intensely engaged in running the operations, ” he says about his plan to franchise the N Supermarkets brand. Gopalakrishnan set up N Dairy Farm (P) Ltd in 2008, following the sale of his family-owned pioneering retail chain Nilgiri’s . Since then, he has set up a robust back-end infrastructure in bakery, staples, dairy and confectionery. The chain’s private label — ‘N’ — is a key part of N Supermarkets’ mix with over 700 products.
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