The founder of India's most successful Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) chain, who introduced McDonald's to the country, is passing on the reins to his son after 26 years.

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Westlife FoodWorld, under the leadership of Amit Jatia and his son Akshay Jatia, has announced an ambitious five-year plan to open between 580 and 630 restaurants and achieve sales of Rs 4,000 to 4,500 crore by 2027.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18's Shilpa Ranipeta, the father-son duo discussed their long-term vision for McDonald's, which includes doubling sales, network, and profitability.

“What we have set out in tangible words is the five-year vision, we want to double sales, double our network, grow profitability. Beyond that, obviously, our longer-term vision is to continue to penetrate the market, continue to give customers this experience that we are so proud of giving them,” Akshay added.

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Over the past two and a half decades, and Amit Jatia has expanded McDonald's to 341 restaurants across the west and south of India, and his club sales are Rs 1,700 crore as of the nine months of FY23.

They also addressed the QSR industry's slowdown, emphasizing their value-for-money proposition, which allows them to retain a larger share of customers even during tough economic times.

Amit Jatia said, “Our philosophy is that as you keep increasing the base, then when tough times in the economy come, we are able to ride that better than anybody else. The second last angle on this is that because QSR is a value segment, while the informal eating out frequency goes down, normally, we are able to retain a larger part of the share, because we have value for money, and people down trade to us so we are relatively alright.”

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They also discussed their strategy for dealing with inflation, which involves optimizing product mix and pricing to maintain margins.

Akshay Jatia said, “Over the last few years, we have done a lot of good work around cost. And we have used multiple levers be it cost, be it PROMIX, which is ensuring that we have the right product mix for our customers or price. We have managed our margins very well so as a result of that, even in the last year where you saw hyper inflation, we reported stable man margins and in fact margin growth at the operating profit level.”

For the entire discussion, watch the accompanying video

(Edited by : Pradeep John)