How Wow! Momo went from 1 table to 274-store chain in 11 yrs

Eleven years ago, college students Sagar Daryani and Binod Homagai invested Rs 30,000 to start in Jadavpur a small venture selling an Indianised version of the Tibetan delight, momos

With 274 kiosks, small and medium-size outlets and big eating joints spread over 13 Indian cities that employ 2,200 people, their projected turnover by the current fiscal end would be around Rs 200 crore.

Daryani and Homagai now plan to come up with fully automated machines to prepare their delicacy, which would tumble out of conveyor belts beyond Indian shores.

That, in short, is the fascinating tale of the humble past, present growth and likely technology-driven future of the quick-service restaurant chain Wow! Momo.

Headquartered at Jadavpur, where it all started in 2008 with a kitchen, two cooks and a table, Wow Momo Foods Private Limited today fully owns and operates 271 outlets. The rest three in Kerala are franchises.

"We were both greenhorns in business, though Sagar's father had a shop. We were the final year B.Com students. Before the results were out, we had launched our business. We thought it was worth taking the risk. If it doesn't work, we'd go for jobs," 34-year-old Homagai, the company's Chief Operating Officer, told IANS.

"I'm a Nepali, we make momos at home. So we thought of this food because we could see the culture of momos developing in Kolkata," he added.

The first store opened in Gachhtala area of Tollygunge in Spencer's Retail hypermarket, where the momos were supplied from the base kitchen in Jadavpur.

Sales touched Rs 2,000 a day. While Homagai managed the store, with two part-time chefs, Daryani stood outside, distributing leaflets, talking to the customers, giving them free samples.

"We ran an offer every 15 days -- buy three, get one free. The offer boosted the sales by 45 to 50 per cent, thereby covering the salaries of the two chefs," he said.

Impressed with their success, the hypermarket chain gave them another store. And very soon they got the third one in the swanky South City Mall, "which made us a brand".

"The part-time cooks now became full-time. And we also started hiring front end staff," he said.

From then on, there was no looking back. They were opening a store every month, and the speed accelerated as time went by. In 2011, Daryani and Homagai decided to expand beyond Kolkata, by setting up a store in Bengaluru.

Till 2015, they had 44 stores and the only bank loan was of Rs 25 lakh. But that year, they roped in IAN, world's leading horizontal seed-stage platform, to invest Rs 10 crore. "With that money, we started building a good management team."

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