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Masala on the menu
Taste buds are changing with globalisation
but evolving into new avatars. While American pizza chains
have become a hit in India by introducing local flavours,
Americans are picking up Indian masala foods, says SPAN
writer E. Wayne
Pizza was invented in 1889 in Naples by Don Raffaele Esposito
as a dish for his queen. The Peshawari Chana Paneer Pizza,
a more recent innovation, was developed by Pizza Hut India's
marketing and research team, headed by Sanjiv Mediratta, to
cater to anyone craving "The Great Indian Treat."
According to Smithsonian magazine, Esposito used buffalo
mozzarella on his groundbreaking pizza, a new ingredient to
be melted atop flat bread. Mediratta also added a significant
innovation to the pizza art form-chickpeas.
As with most new ideas, people scoffed at first. "Everyone
said, 'We can't put chickpeas on it.' I said, if you look
at an Indian consumer, he eats bhatura, which is a bread,
and he eats it with chana. My crust is also a bread. So I
just need to put some chana and onion on top of it,"
says Mediratta. He chucked the basil topping of the original
"Margherita" pizza in favour of onions, paneer,
soft chickpeas, fresh coriander and a sprinkling of masala.
The result: Peshawari Chana Paneer Pizza, now a best selling
item in Pizza Hut's vegetarian range. "It's the consumer
who decides what he wants, not us," says Mediratta. That
has been one of the greatest lessons for U.S.-based restaurant
chains as they entered the Indian market: Indian consumers
crave Indian flavours. Give them a chicken burger, but make
it with mint sauce. Or a submarine sandwich with spicy potato
patties. Keep the international standard of service, cleanliness
and food quality. Keep the food's form and function the same.
But a little masala never hurt anyone.
From unsure and sometimes rough beginnings, American food
chains here are growing fast. Papa John's has just entered
and KFC is resurgent. McDonald's now has 91 restaurants in
India and feeds 350,000 people a day. Pizza Hut had 126 restaurants
in July and is expanding fast into small towns, as is Subway,
with 79 restaurants. In fact, Indian menu options have become
standard for American chains here. Says Robby Gulri, a Subway
representative in India, "When we first introduced Subway
in India, we only had our international selection of subs.
In line with customer feedback we gradually introduced a variety
of Indian subs. These were developed in collaboration with
our local vendors and the R&D department at Subway headquarters,
in Milford, Connecticut."
Newcomer Papa John's didn't have to suffer the learning curve
of early entrants like Pizza Hut and Domino's Pizza (which,
like Subway, both started out with only standard offerings).
Papa John's launched its restaurants with a host of Indian-style
pizzas already on the menu.
The success of the shift speaks for itself. The top selling
McDonald's product is the McAloo Tikki, a potato burger with
spices, tomato slices and a tangy sauce. But making a bestseller
isn't just about whipping up wonders in the kitchen: It's
a long, complicated process involving marketing, supply chains,
kitchen staff and countless tests of taste and pricing. That
new, delicious looking dish advertised in the newspaper often
takes more than a year to develop from concept to reality.
After narrowing the choices from a feedback, an in-house
team rates the selections on taste, presentation and feasibility.
Then comes the biggest test of all: suppliers. Can the meat
suppliers mass produce a kebab that tastes just right and
doesn't cost a fortune? Will the breadsticks crumble before
they are delivered? Neerja Bharat of McDonald's recalls the
company's Indian launch in the early 1990s and the extensive
search for good suppliers. "India had no technical know-how
and expertise on how to grow lettuce," she says. "We
needed lettuce that would crunch when you bite it." It
took McDonald's six years to get the lettuce right, along
with other key food components. The company finally settled
on farming it in Ooty and taught the vendors advanced drip
irrigation methods. The vendors now plan on exporting lettuce
to McDonald's in other countries as well.
Some bright ideas from India have even gone international.
In Pizza Hut's case, the U.S.-based parent introduced a stuffed
crust pizza with strips of mozzarella cheese baked into the
edges. After playing around with crust stuffing technology,
Mediratta and his team found a way to stuff sausages into
the crust instead of cheese. It was a hit. After that, it
was just a matter of time before other countries picked up
the same feature, and sausage crust pizza went worldwide.
Innovations aren't limited to the food either. When McDonald's
started its delivery service, a feature of many of its branches
in Asian countries, it came upon a problem for its Chandni
Chowk branch in New Delhi. "As a model, we use specially
modified and branded scooters for delivery," says Pawanjit
Singh, who heads the delivery division for McDonald's India.
"But looking at the traffic congestion in Chandni Chowk,
we felt that scooters won't allow us to deliver the orders
in time. We finally decided upon bicycles."
It's the only branch of McDonald's worldwide to have this
unique form of delivery.
One integral feature of all the Indian branches of American
brands is vegetarian offerings. KFC has re-launched with a
new menu that's pretty radical for a restaurant known for
its chicken. Its vegetarian range includes a chana burger
and Indian thalis. Says Arvind Mediratta, "When we talk
about the KFC brand, we're not talking about chicken; our
positioning is around taste."
And what of customers from America or Europe who are searching
for a familiar taste from home? Vijay Kadian, manager of a
Pizza Hut in Gurgaon says that Western customers in the business
hub regularly order the local pizzas. "They are visiting
a brand like Pizza Hut but they are in India, and want a taste
of Indian food as well. They order the Indian pizzas."
But, he admits, "without the green chilies."
Photographs by SEBASTIAN JOHN (SPAN)
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