Varun Mahana is the second generation to join his family’s 26 yr old bakery business called Kandy’s Pastry Parlour. The cafe got started in April 1995 by his uncle & his elder brother, and it’s Varun, who now looks after the marketing and operations of the cafe.
Located in Kalkaji, Delhi, It is a friendly neighbourhood outlet for the locals and has been a go-to cafe for the customers for its pocket-friendly and mouth watering desserts and baked savouries. After a successful 10 years run in Delhi, the family opened another outlet in Chandigarh in April 2005 and both the cafe’s have been up and going ever since with little hiccups due to lockdown.
In this episode, Varun talks about the changing trends around bakery over the years, social media platforms as a boon for business and for convenience, the team behind Kandy’s Cafe, and exploring partnering with companies and outsourcing products as an expansion of the business, among lot of other things.
“If your kitchen is running at a hundred & twenty percent capacity, you can make same amount of money or more as you would be opening up an outlet. There’s a lot of things that can happen in the back-end.. We do tie-ups with high-end wedding caterers, with the tours companies as well as with the corporate offices to work at 120% capacity”
Some Topics That We Discusses Include:
- Shift in the bakery trend from 1995 to 2021
- How to maintain Hygiene & Shelf-life of the products in your bakery
- How Kandy’s Kafe do their in-house packaging
- Partnering with Swiggy-Zomato (experience)
- Importance & ways to be visible on Social Media
- Kandy’s Kafe’s Team & Hiring Process
- How to sort revenues and expenses
- Experience of opening a second outlet in a different city
- Benefits of Tie-ups, Partnering and Outsourcing
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