Focus on increasing Domino's outlets: Jubilant FoodWorks

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Q: To understand 10% margin that you are guiding to though in Q4. What is primarily driving it because we are in a situation where food inflation is escalating? Is it that you hope to maintain raw material input cost at a very low level or do you have little bit of elbow room in terms of pricing?

Kaul: It's more to do with our system level growth. As I said, 42-43% in fact in this quarter, we grew as much as 50% over same period last year. Annualised we are growing at 45%. We arguably are the only such player in the industry who is growing at this pace. We are able to leverage these volume growths with our valued business partners. They see the Dominos story and the way we have been growing whether at system level same store growth or whether it's a new store.

As a result we have been able to obviate lot of these price increases. But minimal increases here and there which still come because there is I believe a certain pressure in the food industry, part of it is passed on to our customers. In the month of November, there was a nominal 2% price increase which we took and passed on to our customer.

Q: Aside from this tie-up that Jubilant has with the international brand name of Dominos would you be looking to explore such tie-ups with other large multinational companies (MNC) as well. We understand that you may be in talks with Starbucks for some kind of tie-up?

Bhartia: Our objective was to bring Dominos to a critical mass that means we bring it to a size and scale where the business becomes profitable and the growth adds to more profit. Moving forward we would look at other brands and we have been in conversation with many brands in the last one-two years and depending on our understanding of Indian market and what we feel is going to work on a long-term. We would look at opportunities but we have not finalised any.

Q: But discussions are on with Starbucks?

Bhartia: I would not like to comment on this right now. We continue to talk to many brand owners and this has been ongoing. We look at the market; we look at their product strategies, we see how it can be leveraged in India, how we can build complete supply chain. So there are many factors that go in before you look at building a brand because idea is when we do launch a brand we should be able to scale it across India.

Q: Where you sourced your pepperoni from - it's quite yummy?

Kaul: It's very much done in India. 100% of our ingredients are now created within India and that's something which over the years we have consciously tried to and it's sourced in India now so there is nothing which comes from overseas as far as food ingredients are concerned.