In an interview with BW Retail World, Kartik Anand says that Circle of Crust is targeting 100 outlets by March 2027 and an annual revenue of Rs 108 crore by the next year
As Circle of Crust sharpens its expansion strategy, Kings Global Founder Kartik Anand believes the success of a modern pizza quick service restaurant (QSR) lies in getting the channel mix right, between delivery, aggregator platforms and dine-in. In an interview with BW Retail World, Anand said the brand is targeting 100 outlets by March 2027 and an annual revenue of Rs 108 crore.
Anand noted that while Circle of Crust currently operates only company-owned, company-operated outlets, the next phase of growth over the five years will be driven through a franchisee-invested, company-operated (FICO) model. Edited Excerpts:
You describe the brand as premium yet approachable. How are you balancing mass pricing and also the quality ingredients?
Generally, price is governed by the market and the competition you have. Ideally, given a choice, I would love to sell my pizzas at a much higher price because I think they are super pizzas. But our pricing strategy is mostly derived from the market conditions and our competition. Second, we do a lot of research, we hire companies to research for us.
We know that competition does not spend more on food than us. We spend a lot more. My biggest challenge is to get the food cost down. We did not want to compromise on the quality of ingredients. In fact, we do not want to compromise on the quantity of ingredients going into it. Every pizza that comes out, it has to be heavier on flavour, heavier on ingredients. For example, one of our tiramisu desserts, we chose to put pure 100 per cent mascarpone cheese versus cream or dairy or other dairy products.
Mascarpone cheese is super expensive as an item on a dessert, especially for QSR. But we choose to do it because that is the only product that will give us customers that experience. So anything that is related to customer experience, we are ready to spend money on that.
What does your expansion outlook or roadmap look like over the course of the next one or two years?
We have 19 restaurants that are live, owned by us. There are about a total of 70, including the 19, which are signed up and are in the development and contracted stage. We are aiming to sign and open to take our outlet count to 100 outlets in India by March 2027. We aim to take our revenues to Rs 108 crore annually by opening 100 outlets count. We are on a mission to get these magic numbers by end of 2027.
Since every store that you have is company owned and company operated, are you open to franchising in the near future?
Right now all our stores are company owned and company operated. We own all of the assets and all the people and everything else. But the expansion that we are doing now over the next five years is going to be with the help of a lot more great people who willl join us in the form of franchises, partners to run our franchisee-invested, company-operated (Fico) places. We are heavily looking at that segment as an expansion opportunity.
From the unit economics and break-even timeline perspective, what does a successful Circle of Crust outlet looks like?
The orientation of a successful store for me is to be able to balance out my delivery versus aggregator versus dine-in perfectly. Right now, we are experiencing too heavy aggregator, then take-away and then walk-ins and dine-in customers. We are changing the dynamic a lot.
We are working on improving our dining customers. Pizza category is a delivery category, thanks to some people who deliver in 30 minutes. It is a delivery category, but it’s changing. We see a super positive trend in the last six months. We have seen more customers walking in to restaurants than before.
In context to value-driven, premiumisation, or convenience-first categories, how do you see consumer preferences in pizza and QSR evolving in India?
There are different segments of customers everywhere. Let us talk about premium segment customers, you see so many more new boutique, small formats coming out as restaurants, mom-and-pop stores. I have an idea, I will start a passion project. You see a lot of those passion projects coming out in India as well.
They are not in the QSR category. They are more in the premium segment, both in terms of pricing, experience they give, ingredients they use. They source ingredients from outside. They charge a lot more. We do feel that pizza in general is a premium category item. It is not a cheap category item.
If you make a pizza responsibly, that is the right price to pay for pizzas. There is not much scope to up the price or lower the price. Right now we are sitting in the perfect state of demand as well as supply in the pizza segment.
Beyond food, how are you making sure that the experience looks more like hospitality-led, not transactional QSR?
We do a lot of training. We do a lot of sensitisation with our employees and the people we hire to serve our customers. For example, a very small thing that we do is whenever you receive the pizza in a box, on the lower right hand corner, we write the name of the person who made the pizza.
You should be able to connect with the brand, not only with the product, but the brand as well and the guy who actually made that pizza for you. There are so many other things that we do in terms of regular touchpoint with customers. We have our own central call center to take care of the orders, to take care of the feedback. We also have a very prompt customer service team which will call the customer immediately to resolve whether the issue came in from aggregator or from us.
What is the philosophy behind Circle of Crust?
The idea of Circle of Crust came to me in 2015 when I went to a pizza place in the US. They served me a pizza in a subway format. You would go pick your base, what you want, pick your sauce, pick your cheese, pick your toppings and then they would make the pizza for you.
That whole idea of customisation, the whole idea of having those five or six options on bases intrigued me. I came back and I started researching on is this really possible? Is it possible for me or anyone to order a pizza which is full of spinach or pizza which is gluten-free? At that time, 2015-16, there was no category, Pizza was pretty straightforward then. I worked on it.
The chef came on board. We started working on this. We worked on the whole idea for one year. We started researching on how best we can get that base right with 60 per cent vegetable pulp and 40 per cent flour. That’s what we got, we are the only restaurant that does that kind of thin crust in India.
