Anurag Katriar, Chairman, India Food Service Forum, Founder, Indigo Hospitality and Trustee, NRAI said, “Adapting to changes in customer expectations is the new trend to follow”
Mumbai: Anurag Katriar, founder of Indigo Hospitality, while addressing the audience at the 15th edition of India Food Forum 2022 highlighted the changing scape of food and beverage (F&B) and how a lot of evolution has been winged owing to the pandemic and changes that followed.
“It is time to ride on the trends to bring about the right alterations in business in order to stay true to the evolving customer behaviour,” Katriar said in his speech.
Katriar said home delivery of food took a big spike during the pandemic years but as Covid-19 cases are on the wane in India, customers have started to pour into restaurants.
“There was a short span of time during the pandemic and sometime before that when delivery began to become mainstream and was leading the F&B landscape. However, this was a time when we all were mostly indoors. That trend has diminished and dining is back on track.”
He highlighted that gone are the days when dining out was specific to trying a few handfuls of cuisines and was never about experimentation. While the ride of the new wave in dining started in the 2000s with fine-dining ruling the aisle, it was slowly taken over by casual dining. Today a lot of round the corner bars and dining hotspots are highlighting the customer taste bud and ruling the F&B domain, he told the audience.
“The idea of evolution and change is a constant phenomenon now and is taking a shift every passing day. Earlier when a trend made it to the system, it stayed for a few years to come. However, such is not the case now and it is an era of constant change. So, to evolve, grow, and stay closer to the customer one needs to change picking up the trends quicker,” Katriar further added.
Staying nimble-footed and adapting to change is the need of the hour. Katriar highlighted this fact when summing up the growth trajectory of F&B riding on change at the mega congregation of India’s emeriti of the Food Retail establishment at The Westin Mumbai, Powai Lake on December 8th, 2022 and mentioned the importance of the F&B business and how the landscape is changing swifter than the industry anticipated.
