Dining delights to home delicacies, restaurants get into gourmet retail

From delectable pastes to artisanal blends, savoury chips to ice-creams, culinary treats crafted by in-house chefs are hitting the shelves

- ABHILASHA OJHA

F or its upcoming restaurants in cities such as Bengaluru, Mumbai and New Delhi, Burmese restaurant Burma Burma is redesigning its interiors to create prominent shelf space for its merchandise and ready-to-eat gourmet products.

These include khow suey pastes, chilli garlic oils, ready-to-eat lotus stem chips, tea leaf salad paste, crunchy seed mix, dry Burmese spices, tea blends, and artisanal icecreams, along with t-shirts and branded chopsticks.

Burma Burma is one of many restaurants that are diversifying into gourmet retail.

Azure Hospitality, which runs pan-India food and beverage brands such as Mamagoto, Dhaba Estd 1986, Sly Granny and Foxtrot ventured into food retail in 2021. In the last two years, Café Diva, Hunan at Home (Bengaluru), Mahabelly (New Delhi), Kitchen Garden by Suzette (Mumbai) and Fig & Maple (New Delhi) have joined the list of restaurants that are selling gourmet pantry staples.

Among the first to enter the gourmet retail segment was ITC's iconic restaurant, Bukhara, which turned 45 this year. It launched its brand of ready-to-eat gourmet products, including its signature dal Bukhara, way back in 2001.

Customer acquisition and loyalty, besides brand recall, are some of the reasons restaurants are strategically pivoting towards gourmet food retail and merchandising.

When pandemic bit

For most players, this category was a construct of the Covid pandemic, when they returned to the drawing board to re-strategise as restaurants remained shut during the lockdown.

Post-pandemic, it has become a marketing strategy to widen the consumer base.

Take the case of Burma Burma, which launched its retail vertical in 2021 with eight products. Now, it has 25 to 30.

Apart from the restaurant's website, these products are available on platforms such as Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy and Zomato, as well as in the retail store Nature's Basket.