The most important responsibility is creating value for the share holders

Murali Parna shares with Restaurant India the current F&B trend, the supply chain management process and also the reason for foreign restaurants tasting success in India.

Tell us something about the current F&B trend in India?

The outlook is really positive and the opportunity is quite huge. The younger population makes eating out more often which is actually the size of the opportunity for this country.

What is your take on the popular trend of this industry?

Low priced, ‘on-the-move’ food will probably be the big thing in next 2-3 years. Affordable and good quality snacking out will increase. Very soon round the clock food will be required. Home delivery as a trend would be probably one of the biggest one.

Please tell us about your role as COO of Sagar Ratna. What is your core responsibility?

The most important responsibility is creating value for the shareholders, making this business relevant in this high competition QSR environment and engaging and keeping customers for life.

You have more than two decades of experience in operations. Please tell something about the supply chain management.

We have a centralised supply chain system. The decision making is centralised, the ability to know what to reach out to various restaurants is all centralised. We only do local deliveries for local products but the specifications are very crystal clear. We do some kind of ‘hub and scope’ model as well for semi finished goods but that is primarily in-house arrangement. We haven’t outsourced the supply chain on that.

Elaborate your journey from Godrej to Lintas and then to the F&B segment.

I feel the decisions I have taken in my career are a bit planned. I started with sales primarily to know how to build customer relationship. Later on I went into brand management to understand how brands are created and marketed and then I went into retailing. In retail, I started with grocery because it was in my mind that any business may die but grocery will not because that is the basic necessity. The next obvious choice was F&B which is one of the largest segments. So, I feel, over the years I have gained good amount of experience in sales, brand management, supply chain and then getting into running a business.

What advice you would like to give the aspiring restaurateurs?

Do not compromise on quality, keep up the standards, know the customer- what exactly they want because until and unless you can’t identify who your customer is do not get into this business.