30 Under 30: Restaurateur Karan Tanna's U-turn has held him in good stead

Image: Mexy Xavier


Karan Tanna | 29
Founder & CEO, Yellow Tie Hospitality
Category: Food & Hospitality

Karan Tanna did not always aim to be a restaurateur. An automobile engineer from Sardar Patel University in Anand, Gujarat, he has worked with General Motors India at its Halol plant in Gujarat, and McKinsey & Company in Mumbai and Delhi. He even started his own multi-brand automobile service and repair chain, Car Pluss, in Ahmedabad, in 2012.

But despite the many jobs and private ventures, it was the restaurant business that always fascinated Tanna, thanks to childhood memories of his parents running a small restaurant for a few years in the family’s hometown of Veraval in Gujarat.

Between 2012 and 2015, Tanna helped scale up a Parsi restaurant chain called Goodies, started a bakery called FlourBox, and expanded a fast-food chain called Kutchi King from 18 to 200 outlets; all these ventures were spread across Gujarat.

Finally, in December 2015, he co-founded Yellow Tie Hospitality Franchise Management LLP, which manages and ramps up food and beverage (F&B) brands in India. Among his clients are US-based Genuine Broaster Chicken (GBC), Twist of Tadka and BB Jaan (the last two in association with chef Harpal Singh Sokhi); also in the pipeline is Tanna’s in-house F&B chain brand Dhadoom, which is yet to be launched.

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Tanna takes a licence of F&B brands, and then signs on franchise-partners who open stores of those brands. He looks after his partners’ operational requirements—from setting up of stores to vendor-sourcing and logistics—for which he charges a one-time fee and subsequently takes a share of the monthly sales.

So far, he has opened five stores of Genuine Broaster Chicken (in Mumbai, Kolkata, Raipur, Surat and Patna) and one each of Twist of Tadka (Amritsar) and BB Jaan (Jalandhar).

“It is a disruption in the restaurant management market. I think this will bridge the gap between willing entrepreneurs and the franchisor of good brands,” says Anjan Chatterjee, managing director, Speciality Restaurants Ltd.

At present, Tanna is focussed on increasing GBC to 25 outlets by May, and has plans to expand his portfolio to 10 F&B brands by the end of 2018.

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