Biraja Rout, founder of Biggies Burger talks about his aspirations and his journey from being an IT professional to the owner of one of the fastest-growing burger café chains in the country
Competing against huge multinational brands is no mean feat. Yet, homegrown burger company Biggies Burger is making its mark on the Indian quick service restaurant (QSR) scene despite the dominance of global majors like McDonald’s and KFC.
Helmed by Biraja Rout, Biggies Burger started as a small kiosk in Bengaluru. Rout, an IT-professional, left a high-paying job to pursue his passion and love for cooking to set up a Burger business. Along with its pan-India reach, today, Biggies Burger is spread across 28 cities and operates over 152 franchise stores in 14 states across India. It now runs two formats of the quick service burger chain – a regular outlet and a Bigg Café, a new format which the brand recently introduced. After launching the format at Kalyan Nagar in Bengaluru, it recently opened at Kasavanahalli.
The burger chain brand’s success is paving the way for further expansion and innovation. Rout’s target is to open 306 outlets by end 2023. He plans to achieve this by opening 10 stores each month for the next twelve months and there are already 38 stores in the pipeline for the coming month.
In an interview with IndiaRetailing, Biraja Rout, founder of Biggies Burger talks about the company’s retail roadmap, future plans, and more.
What is the difference between your regular outlets and a Bigg Café?
This is a Biggies Burger outlet only, but with an extension of Bigg cafes. When I say extension, it’s a module, just like McDonald’s has a McCafe or Burger King has a BK cafe. Through these extensions, brands are entering into hot beverages such as coffee and desserts. We too felt that there is a good demand and growth for coffee as a beverage and have created this module as Bigg Cafe, which will have catalogues of products designed around coffee and dessert.
The Kasavanahalli outlet is one of our recent Bigg Cafe outlets. This whole portfolio of Bigg Cafe was launched hardly a month back at Kalyan Nagar. At a Bigg Cafe, the offers could a cappuccino for Rs 89 or a muffin at Rs 99, which will typically complete the whole lifecycle of a meal from a burger brand.
How do you compete with big global competitors already established in the country?
When we started Biggies Burger in 2011, we only had McDonald’s and KFC in the country. Burger being a global product, our USP was to Indianise this global product. We have kept ourselves steady in terms of consumers’ mindsets or preferences, just by providing them with more authentic, and Indianized versions of products. That has been the key strength for us to stand out against the global players.
How do you localize your menu in different states?
Our menu is flat across the country as a QSR and we cannot have a different menu at different places. Starting from Punjab, till the last outlet in Madurai, Pondicherry, Gujarat, or Shillong, all our outlets have a standard menu and we keep the market-centric, small menu for a specific market. Bengaluru is a cosmopolitan market where the understanding of a gourmet burger or standard burger is high. Here, we do not struggle to change our menu a lot because people understand what we are selling.
But if I go to a remote market, let’s say, I go to Gujarat where they need pure vegetarian products, we add another menu which will have only vegetarian products. If I go to Madurai, where the requirement for spices is high, we add a localized Chettinad menu over there. Those are hardly 8 to 10% of alterations that we make. That too not on the main menu, but on the secondary menu.
Any companies you look up to for inspiration?
Absolutely. We are not inventing something different. We all have benchmarks, but there are global brands from whom we take inspiration. The first and foremost inspirators are Indian brands like Haldiram’s which is today a legendary brand in the country. But we wanted to make American cuisine our core portfolio and go global.
Our vision is to create India’s largest QSR burger chain and take it global. The way McDonald’s came from the US to India, we want an Indian brand to go to the US and other markets. Brands like McDonald’s, Subway, and Starbucks have been growing through a franchising network. We are also looking forward to the same path. If they can do it, why not an Indian brand?
How do you market your brand?
Being a bootstrapped company has limitations…not every company has the luxury or opportunity of marketing their brand to the maximum, some companies grow organically. So, I was forced to choose the way of organic growth from the inception and I believe in that kind of growth. Consumers are coming to you for a reason not because of your flashy or trendy marketing or advertisement. We would like to follow the same path in the future, where we will be promoting majorly our core strength and core products. And organic peer-to-peer marketing will be the best source of generating new customers for us in the future as well.
Tell us about your online business.
Our primary focus is being offline, but as the online market is growing, we are also diverting ourselves and understanding the skill set of how to become a market leader in online spaces. Our online-to-offline revenue ratio is 20:80.
We open 1,000 or 2,000 sq. ft. cafes and put a humongous amount of energy and effort to make them look beautiful aesthetically and give a good experience to the consumer. One does not go to McDonald’s just for a burger, but also for an experience, right? I believe experience is the strongest recall value for anything and everything.
Who are your delivery partners?
In delivery, I believe Swiggy and Zomato are leading the races. We have little understanding of the delivery and hyperlocal market. Delivery is not the primary stream of revenue for us because of multiple reasons. Our primary focus has been in-store experience and walk-in stores. Unlike pizzas or biryanis, which can be microwaved or heavily heated, reheating burgers becomes tough. So, we want to keep ourselves as a walk-in centric brand, and delivery, may contribute 20% with a different product catalogue.
Any fundraising plans?
For the last 10 years of operation, Biggies Burger was a bootstrapped company. We never raised any funds from the market until 2022. We have moved into the fundraising spree because we felt like we as a brand are now mature enough to scale and grow in numbers. For that, we needed new brains on the board, and we wanted to be mentored by the right people who have scaled big companies.
We may go for a second round of fundraising later this year or early next year. As of now, we do have our runway and we do have our contingency and deposit with us.
Tell us about your expansion plans for 2023.
To be honest, at this point in time, the whole team is motivated by a single goal of making Biggies the largest burger brand in Bengaluru. Today, we are the largest homegrown burger brand in India with 152 franchise stores onboarded. In Bengaluru itself, we have 12 Biggies Burger outlets, out of which only two are Bigg Cafes and probably within the next six months, we are planning for another 50 outlets only in Bengaluru, most of which will be Bigg Cafes. When it comes to the volume of progress sales in Bengaluru we are lagging behind. And by June, our target is to be the largest burger-selling brand in Bengaluru.
