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July 20, 2026
Kartikay Kashyap, Financial Express / Brandwagon
30 July 2026
Wendy’s first foray into India’s quick service restaurant (QSR) market in 2015 remained a non-starter. Sierra Nevada Restaurants, the then master franchisee, could not scale its retail presence beyond four conventional restaurants concentrated largely in Delhi-NCR. This limited physical availability, brand awareness and ordering frequency.
Ten years on and under a new master franchisee Rebel Foods since 2023, Wendy’s seems to have turned over a new leaf. With more than 250 stores, and ₹200 crore in revenues, the brand wants to be the one-stop destination for the younger generation where consumers come together to celebrate food, music and a sense of community. “The longer-term ambition is to expand to approximately 500 locations by 2028 through a combination of delivery kitchens and physical restaurants,” says Joy Bamania, brand head, Wendy’s India.
As a first step, Rebel Foods recently opened what it calls its “dynamic cultural flagship store” in Delhi’s vibrant student hub of Hudson Lane, GTB Nagar. The two-level youth-centric space blends food, music and anime, offering fans experiences like live rap battles, meet-and-greets, and specialised menu items like the signature Teriyaki Burger range.
“It has been designed to be livelier, more youthful and visually engaging—an Instagram-worthy space. It is a physical expression of how we want consumers to experience Wendy’s in India: bold, fun, culturally relevant and full of energy,” says Bamania.
Even before taking over Wendy’s operations Rebel Foods had been managing its delivery-only cloud kitchens since 2020 and was familiar with the brand’s DNA and what was required to mount a serious challenge in the ₹15,000-plus crore organised burger restaurants market in the country. The low capex delivery-only model has helped to improve its gross margins, but taking on established brands like McDonalds, KFC and Burger King would be a completely new ball game.
Is the latecomer up to a second bout in the ring?
New, improved
Wendy’s has at least three things going against it. It arrived late on India’s shores and couldn’t really stand apart during its last outing. “No matter how big a global brand you are, you need to stand out in the clutter,” says Devangshu Dutta, founder & CEO, Third Eyesight.
So while McDonald’s is the kid-first family restaurant, Burger King is intentionally “imperfect” and rides on humour, pop-culture moments, and viral marketing. Wendy’s, say experts, had no differentiation than just being a global brand.
Its premium pricing was another bugbear. In its first foray, Wendy’s tried to justify its higher prices saying its ingredients were better than that offered by the rest of the pack. So while the price of a Wendy’s entry level burger was ₹100, McDonald’s retailed one at half that price. “In the QSR business, you have to get your price right. There is nothing ‘premium’ in that space,” says Ankur Bisen, senior partner, The Knowledge Company. Rebel Foods addressed these problems with four fundamental shifts.
First, it used the existing technology, kitchen and supply-chain infrastructure to rapidly expand Wendy’s beyond Delhi-NCR. Second, it built a stronger and more accessible value architecture while introducing flavours suited to Indian preferences. Third, it created an omnichannel model in which cloud kitchens delivered reach and convenience, while selected dine-in restaurants built visibility and deeper brand experiences. Finally, it adopted a data-led approach to menu development, pricing, consumer feedback and operational performance.
Rebel Foods became Wendy’s master franchisee in India in 2023. At that stage, Wendy’s had approximately 90 locations across 19 cities. By March 2025, the brand had reached 200 locations across more than 50 cities, including 15 dine-in restaurants.
“The fivefold revenue growth has consequently not come from one product or campaign. It is the result of wider distribution, sharper value, continuous menu innovation, stronger operational execution and a much clearer proposition for the Indian consumer,” says Bamania.
(Published in Financial Express)
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July 13, 2026
Sowmya Ramasubramanian, Vaeshnavi Kasthuril (MINT)
Bengaluru, 13 July 2026
India’s vertical quick-commerce startups across categories like baby care, medicines and fashion, backed by venture capital heavyweights, are beginning to redefine what “quick” means.
For some, the race is no longer about cutting delivery times by a few more minutes. Instead, founders are increasingly talking about better assortment, sharper curation, stronger supply chains and healthier unit economics as the factors that will decide whether the model survives.
Baby care platform Ozi, backed by Blume Ventures and RTP Global, has settled on a roughly 60-minute delivery promise. Founder Amit Sah told Mint the company would rather optimise for “quality selection” than chase ultra-fast deliveries, arguing that customers today are looking for reliable availability and curated choices rather than insisting on receiving products in 10 minutes.
Lightspeed-backed fashion startup Slikk is pursuing a similar path. Founder Akshay Gulati said the company’s focus since inception has been building a wide catalogue rather than aggressively acquiring users.
The shift comes as the sector enters a more pragmatic phase. Quick fashion startup Blip shut down within a year of launch last June, while rival Klydo has recently pivoted its business model, raising questions about the viability of firms in every category.
The crop of vertical quick commerce startups—focused on rapid delivery within a single, specific product category—has largely emerged over the past two years, inspired by the explosive growth of grocery-focused pioneers such as Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and IPO-bound Zepto, which have accustomed consumers to receiving groceries and everyday essentials within minutes.
Other prominent startups include Plazza for quick delivery of medicines, Instafix for mobile repairs within minutes, and Dazzl for at-home salon services.
Kalaari Capital noted in its 2025 report that quick commerce had already captured about two-thirds of online grocery orders and around 10% of India’s overall e-retail spending in 2024, transforming consumer behaviour and building the infrastructure for specialised vertical players to emerge.
“Speed was never a real moat but became a hygiene factor once every significant player could promise 10-30 minute delivery,” said Devangshu Dutta, founder and chief executive of consultancy Third Eyesight. “Assortment depth, availability, trust, and sustained price-value have been, and will remain, the true differentiation levers. For categories such as medicines and baby products, credibility and compliance outweigh saved minutes, apart from urgent purchases.”
“Unit economics can become healthier only where there’s a clear reason for frequent and repeated purchases. Groceries and medicines are repeat, low consideration categories, while fashion is high consideration, driven by fit, styling and browsing. The best quick commerce categories have low or no returns and high order frequency, whereas rapid fashion delivery faces high return rates due to product mismatch against customer expectations (sizing, fit, fabric and colour),” Dutta said.
Different categories, different playbooks
While fashion startups are investing heavily in discovery and inventory refreshes, Ozi believes the opportunity in baby care lies in curation and premiumisation.
Sah said each sub-category within baby care presents a different operational challenge. Consumables require deep availability of long-tail brands, while fashion depends on filtering products for quality rather than listing everything available. Ozi, which delivers wipes, diapers, and baby food, deliberately curates brands instead of maximising assortment, targeting parents willing to pay slightly more for trusted products.
“The customer behaviour has shifted from discovery first to search first,” Sah said, adding that shoppers today are not necessarily looking for ultra-fast delivery, but nor are they willing to wait several days. “A modern-age customer values quality. They are happy to pay an 8-10% or 12% differential, but they need quicker access to better brands and better assortment.”
Fashion startups argue that their challenge is different altogether.
Gulati said Slikk has built its business around supply rather than customer acquisition, claiming that stronger assortment has helped steadily reduce acquisition costs. The company replaces 30-40% of inventory in every dark store each month and is expanding neighbourhood by neighbourhood instead of spreading rapidly across cities.
Slikk might also consider introducing private brands for apparel, given their higher margins, Gulati said.
Bengaluru-based fast-fashion e-commerce startup Knot, which raised $5 million from 12 Flags and Kae Capital in December 2025, is investing heavily in back-end technology. Its app captures user preferences through swipe-based interactions, while its dark stores carry much wider assortments than horizontal quick commerce operators – offering a vast, multi-category collection of goods – and customise inventory based on local demand.
“We look at fashion as a data science problem and not really an intuition problem,” co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Archit Nanda said.
Nanda said fashion’s long-tail nature—which relies on selling small quantities of several unique products rather than depending on a few popular items – means inventory commonality across dark stores is significantly lower than grocery, requiring specialised supply chains and hyperlocal merchandising.
The profitability test
The changing strategies also reflect growing investor scrutiny of unit economics.
Slikk’s Gulati said investors continue to back the category but increasingly want proof that businesses can balance growth with profitability rather than relying on heavy customer acquisition spending. He believes execution in neighbourhood-level operations, assortment and brand partnerships will ultimately determine the winner.
Knot’s Nanda said that fashion combines high average order values with healthy margins, making the category attractive despite its complexity.
However, analysts believe that not every vertical is equally suited to the model.
“Looking ahead, horizontal cross-subsidy will work better, with established, well-capitalised players (Myntra’s M-Now, Nykaa Now) including quick delivery into an existing catalogue and logistics network rather than building it standalone. For narrow, high-trust verticals (medicines, baby care) where the value is availability and authenticity rather than impulse, and where margins can support the delivery cost, quick commerce can work,” Dutta noted.
Kalaari Capital’s 2025 report on vertical quick commerce similarly argued that specialised players will win by solving category-specific pain points, with assortment depth, customer experience, and category expertise emerging as key differentiators.
(Published in MINT)
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July 9, 2026
Neethi Lisa Rojan & Vaeshnavi Kasthuril, MINT
Mumbai/Bengaluru, 8 July 2026
The collapse of the US-Iran peace deal in less than a month has rattled India’s consumer sector, reviving fears that higher oil prices and fresh supply-chain disruptions could squeeze demand just as companies were betting on a broader recovery.
The renewed uncertainty followed US President Donald Trump’s declaration on Wednesday that the peace deal with Iran was effectively over, alongside Washington’s decision to end a sanctions waiver on Iranian energy supplies. The market reaction was swift. The Nifty FMCG Index fell 2.49% on Wednesday, underperforming the broader market as all 15 constituents declined, led by Dabur India, Hindustan Unilever, and Tata Consumer Products, whose shares fell 3-4% each. The benchmark Nifty50 ended 2.12% lower after renewed hostilities in West Asia pushed crude prices higher.
Executives and analysts said companies have little room to respond immediately, leaving them to closely monitor devel opments as risks to costs and consumer spending mount. “I don’t think companies can react on this kind of a short notice,” said Arvind Singhal, chairman of consulting firm The Knowledge Company. “It takes 2-6 months to make any change in your plans and strategy. I think right now the Indian FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) companies will be watching the progress of monsoon more carefully than the Strait of Hormuz.”
Even after the US-Iran peace deal took effect on 18 June, consumer companies were unlikely to have expected immediate relief, analysts said.
“While everyone hoped for a cessation in hostilities, smart management teams would work on the realistic expectation that even with a ceasefire, pent-up supply chain input costs need to be absorbed over time, and pricing plans must be factored accordingly,” Devangshu Dutta, founder and chief executive of consulting firm Third Eyesight, said.
“Given that the conflict zone is active, I don’t think there is any immediate likelihood of pricing freeze or reductions, even though demand in rural areas as well as in lower-income urban segments is likely to be hit from both sides ― earnings and expenses.”
Large consumer goods companies including Dabur, Emami and Godrej Consumer had recently told investors they remained confident about consumer demand, including in rural markets.
But the renewed rise in crude prices, coupled with erratic monsoons marked by rainfall deficit in some regions and flooding in others, threatens to complicate that outlook. Higher fuel costs could lift prices of crude-linked raw materials such as plastic packaging and ingredients used in soaps and creams, while persistent inflation could push consumers to cut discretionary apne ding and trade down even on staples.
Major consumer companies had already raised prices or reduced grammage across packaged food, beverages and personal care products in the March quarter.
“As far as the crude prices are concerned, that is probably the only variable where the government has to decide as far as pricing of crude or the petroleum in India is concerned,” Singhal said.
That comes at an awkward time for India’s largest consumer companies, including Hindustan Unilever, which had earlier this year told analysts they intended to drive growth through higher volumes rather than price increases. A renewed bout of inflation could undermine that strategy.
(Published in MINT)
admin
May 25, 2026
Vaeshnavi Kasthuril, MINT
Bengaluru, 25 May 2026
Value fashion retailers across the country are likely to face margin pressure in the upcoming quarters as rising crude oil prices are driving up the cost of polyester and other fabrics. Executives at V-Mart Retail Ltd, Vishal Mega Mart Ltd, and Kewal Kiran Clothing Ltd (KKCL) said crude oil-linked inflation has begun to push up yarn and sourcing costs across apparel and general merchandise categories, with the full impact expected to play out over the next few months.
Value fashion retailers face a double whammy: their heavy reliance on polyester and synthetic blends exposes them to crude-linked inflation, while their price-sensitive customer base leaves little room to pass on rising costs without hurting demand.
Apparel contributes about 22.8% of the overall revenue of the country’s largest retailer, DMart, in FY26. Rising polyester and fabric prices could also weigh on this share, which has been declining since FY20.
“We see almost 60% to 70% consumption of polyester yarn or poly-based product lines, which have or will get impacted,” said Lalit Agarwal during the company’s March-quarter earnings call. Agarwal said that yarn prices had already risen sharply in recent weeks. “There is a rise of almost 10% to 15% in the yarn prices, which effectively converts to almost 5% to 7% in the apparel prices,” he said.
“Cost increases are at multiple points. One, of course, is raw material, which is not only fabric, but also polyester buttons, thread, packaging, all of that,” Devangshu Dutta, founder of Third Eyesight, a consulting firm, said. “Because with value, you cannot really pass on the price hikes so readily to the consumer.”
Dutta said that lower- and middle-income consumers were already under financial stress from broader inflationary pressures, “so, they will not be able to absorb price hikes as easily as well.”
Ebitda margins in Q4FY26 are 10.9% for V-Mart Retail, 13.6% for Vishal Mega Mart and 19.1% for Kewal Kiran Clothing.
Double whammy for value segment
Gunender Kapur, CEO of Vishal Mega Mart, during the company’s March-quarter earnings call, said the inflationary impact had started becoming visible towards the end of April and would likely intensify in the coming months.
Despite rising input costs, retailers said they are avoiding broad-based price hikes on entry-level products amid fragile demand conditions in the value segment.
Entry-level products for these retailers range from ₹199 to ₹399, with some going up to ₹1,500.
“We would never tinker with the opening price points and the lower price points in these difficult times, because those are the customers who are the most vulnerable in inflationary situations,” Kapur said.
Hemant Jain, CEO of KKCL, said the company was willing to absorb part of the pressure on profitability to protect revenues and market share.
Jain also said the company had not yet implemented price hikes despite the inflationary environment.
To cushion the impact, companies said they are increasingly relying on cost optimisation, fabric innovation, premium fashion products and deeper expansion into smaller towns to sustain growth.
V-Mart said it was attempting to offset part of the inflation through alternative fabric usage, sourcing efficiencies and tighter inventory planning.
The retailer has also blocked orders in advance and is utilising existing yarn and fabric inventories available with vendors to soften the immediate impact of rising prices.
Vishal Mega Mart’s Kapur said it has revived cost-saving measures from the post-Ukraine cotton inflation cycle, including replacing cartons with gunny bags, removing polybags from some apparel categories, and shipping footwear without outer cartons.
The retailer has also increased the use of computer-aided design systems to reduce fabric waste during cutting.
Premium products, private labels offer buffer
These value retailers are also increasingly depending on premium and higher-fashion assortments, where consumers are relatively less price sensitive, to absorb selective price increases while keeping entry-level products affordable.
Kapur said Vishal Mega Mart’s large private-label portfolio, which contributes over 74% of its revenue, gives it greater flexibility to manage pricing pressure while maintaining discounts against national brands.
KKCL on the other hand, said it would absorb part of the inflationary impact rather than immediately pass on higher costs to consumers.
These retailers are also increasingly leaning on expansion into smaller towns and deeper markets to drive incremental growth as discretionary spending in larger urban centres remains uneven.
Value fashion retailers have underperformed the broader market amid growing concerns over rising input costs and margin pressure. Shares of V-Mart Retail, V2 Retail Ltd, Vishal Mega Mart and Kewal Kiran Clothing have fallen between 4% and 11% on a year-to-date basis, while the benchmark BSE rose 6.1% during the same period.
(Published in MINT)
admin
May 15, 2026
The ET Now Swadesh panel discussion focussed on the dual challenge facing the Indian economy: a weakening rupee and rising crude oil prices, which together are driving “imported inflation” and straining household budgets. Devangshu Dutta (Founder, Third Eyesight) put forth the following key points during the discussion (the video link is under the text summary below):
1. Dual Impact on Industry and Consumers:
2. Vulnerability of Small Businesses (SMEs):
3. Income vs. Expenditure Strain:
4. Ripple Effect of Crude Oil Beyond Logistics:
5. Shifts in Consumer Spending Patterns & “Shrinkflation”:
The panel noted that while the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has adequate foreign exchange reserves to defend the rupee temporarily, the definitive solution relies heavily on the cooling down of global geopolitical tensions (such as the Middle East conflict affecting the Strait of Hormuz). Until then, Indian consumers will need careful financial planning and smart spending adjustments to navigate this inflationary phase. [Video below.]
