Spaghetti, cheese, truffle ... and the list ends at a 7-course meal metaphorically put, but indeed a 7-brand entity for Little Italy, the first destination for authentic Italian food in India. Started in Pune in 1989, the Italian restaurant brand has expanded not just across cuisines, but also across 109 doors within and beyond national territories. Manufacturing an entire range of food products from ravioli to their sauces with painstaking finesse and detail, a walkthrough at Little Italy’s factory at Hadapsar in Pune was an experience as delightful as the stuffing in their pasta! And Amrut Mehta, MD, Little Italy; and Raj Mehta, brand chairman were happy to oblige!

The factory in Pune is the hub of all forms of innovation and experiments with exotic cheese, a healthier pizza variant under the banner of Piazza, all forms of sauces and salsa. Little Italy has seen waves of change in the appetizers of the well-traveled Punekar, and is on its way to have Italian cuisine its rightful place among the top food to crave for in India. All preservation practices are natural, so as to retain the originality of menus carefully crafted by Indian and even Italian chefs. A strong logistics and supply chain developed over the last 20 years enables Little Italy to deliver to a city as far off as Jaipur in 36 hours.   
   
From Pune to Global
 
The vision of Raj Mehta, an ambitious restaurateur of La Pizzeria in Pune, was to introduce informed Indian customers with a knack for Italian food. Pune, says Raj, is a brilliant testing ground for new businesses because of its local population, as opposed to the fast-moving Mumbai crowd. Pune has a cosmopolitan crowd that appreciates the esoteric style in Italian fine dining. The city  is a food processing hub and a test market, while Mumbai has a lot of moving crowd. It’s Pune’s local culture of dining out that encouraged us to expand further,” he maintains, adding how the brand opened its first outlet in Mumbai in 1995, in Goa in 1998, and then across Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad to make way for Dubai, and Nepal with talks on its first fine dining destination ongoing in London. They are live on Instamart and are in talks with Blinkit on e-commerce and Nature's Basket and Reliance on modern trade. Currently their Acasa products are available in stores such as Dorabjee’s, Fine Foods, and Deli Essentials.

Yet, the pandemic proved to be a sharp turning point for Little Italy, when the brand had to brainstorm and devise a way to serve its loyal customers with easy access to Italian food. That’s how Acasa (meaning ‘at home’ in Italian) was born with easy-to-cook, do-it-yourself Italian food kits for lockdown. “Currently in home cooking, the Italian segment makes up for 15 percent of the total share. However, popular food items such as pizza and pasta are found in over 70% of Indian restaurants. This, coupled with a major lifestyle change propelled by the youth who want delicious food cooked easily makes us diversify to other categories in the quick service restaurant (QSR) category with Piazza and Mexican sub-brand Senorita,” says Amrut.  

Guiding Franchisees with Infrastructure

Partnering with Little Italy guarantees benefits such as an end-to-end solution beyond basic branding and technical know-how. “Right from shortlisting locations to pre and post opening, we help our valued partners with marketing, HR, operations, supply chain management, IT and financial support to grow holistically. Solving the biggest pain point of the right work force in the HoReCa industry, we are engaged in a continuous process of hiring, training and deploying workforce across outlets, thus strengthening outlet-level economics and performance with prompt supply of the right raw material,” says Raj. 

The key determinant of success is the expansion of outlets handled by the franchisees, most of whom are past customers of Little Italy. A lot goes into making each outlet multi-functional, with diners, banquet and outdoor food delivery model, and cloud kitchen for Piazza and Senoritas from the same outlet. Such performances increase the viability of each outlet, now more so with shop-in-shops upselling customers of the restaurant. Their loyalty card system is helping customers increase involvement with the brand via cash-backs and rewards. There is also an app in the making.

Little Italy has also come a long way from using labor-intensive teams to aggregate and analyze the voice of customers to using CRM software, applying artificial intelligence to get the idea across platforms with a few clicks. Ai has even helped them spot and solve a customer concern regarding their lasagnas before. “Proper traceability in the production process helped us find out that it was the cooking time that was causing the issue,” explains Lojo Karathra, CEO, Little Italy. 

Buon Appetito

Pizza and pasta apart, there is Tutto Bene, a cafe brand specializing in coffee and bakery; Akss, a modern Indian restaurant brand, and Little India, a sub-brand within Little Italy. With hands on deck for cloud kitchen and food delivery as well, the umbrella brand of Little Italy aims for a bigger market share instead of focusing on one sector only. “Little Italy is still a premium, niche brand, but the QSR brands allow us to approach the mass market consisting of middle and upper-middle classes who have taken a liking to gourmet. Evolving demands of consumers have helped Little Italy take centre stage with fresh pasta in an already saturated market for dry pasta with truffle and exotic cheeses,” concludes Amrut.