Burger King eyes highway stop-overs as key drivers of its growth in India

After setting up 212 restaurants across 50 cities in the country, Burger King is focussing on expanding its restaurant chain across the upcoming world-class stopovers on the highways and sees them as a major growth avenue for the company.

"Significant investment is being undertaken to develop the country's highways and a lot of these are coming up with nice built-in stoppages and rest areas that are being now auctioned off. That is becoming a major development for us especially in the northern parts of the country. We are eyeing this avenue of growth," Burger King India's chief executive officer, Rajeev Varman told Business Standard.

The company will collaborate with stop-over management consolidators who will participate in the bids to develop food courts and rest areas along the highways. Such stop-overs will house multiple brands of restaurants and will have modern amenities for passengers and travellers to halt and rest.

This expansion will be funded internally by investors in the Indian entity of Burger King. Everstone holds around 87 per cent in the company while the US-based brand parent, Burger King Corporation, holds around 12 per cent. Varman also holds a stake.

The new focus area follows the company's recent decision to enter east India, after finalising its distribution centre and setting up several restaurants across high traffic locations such as malls, airports, standalone eateries and others.

Since its entry into India in 2013, Burger King, known for its whoppers, has build its network chain across prominent malls either as full restaurants or as food courts. It as has also tapped high streets and metro station locations in Delhi and Mumbai, and is present in some of the software parks as well. Burger King has also set up outlets in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Cochin airports and is aiming to increase its presence in more airports.

Varman said despite the surge in cloud kitchens and online food delivery, Burger King will continue to focus on the brick-and-mortar model. In the last fiscal year, it had opened 58 new outlets and this year, it has so far opened 26. Thirty more will come up by the end of December.

"We have a massive brand and are present in over 100 countries around the world. We are not interested in hiding this brand and prefer high-traffic locations that offer high visibility -- that is more exciting for us. For us, the real experience is to have customers come in to a Burger King restaurant and feel the ambience and experience the products," he told this newspaper.

Asked if the company sees any looming issues with the vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes it is offering, Varman said such incidents continue to happen and the industry has to deal with it. In the recent past, some delivery agents of Zomato had resorted to a strike in Kolkata after they refused to deliver non-vegetarian food to customers.

Burger King is already profitable at the store level, and Varman is of the view that in the last fiscal year, the company has turned EBITDA positive.