There couldn't be a more awful place and time to be a chicken than India now. While many food fads in India remain just that, fads, there seems to be no letup in the intake of chicken. Take companies such as Venky's and Suguna that buy, process and peddle chicken parts; they are doing bloody well.
It isn't hard to see why. India is truly a Chicken Country — this is the land of tandoori chicken, chicken tikka, butter chicken, the (Indian) chilli chicken,
not to forget the many kebabs, chicken toofani (okay, we made that up, but you get the drift), chicken on pizzas and in salads and lately McDonald's and KFC. Crowded? You bet.
It is into this market that Nando's, a South African company with five outlets in India — the latest opened in Delhi's Vasant Kunj on Saturday — is looking to expand. Challenging? You bet, says Deepinder Singh Batth, CEO of Nando's Delhi NCR.
"We are trying to take chicken to north Indians, which is like taking pasta to the Italians," he says. "That said, I think it is a big enough market for everybody to play together."
Batth's confidence comes from the success of Nando's — it takes its name from the first name of one of the company's two South African founders, Fernando Duarte — which has rarely put a foot wrong in the nearly 30 countries it is present.
Nando's has the Peri-Peri Chicken, a spicy dish invented by Portuguese settlers in Mozambique (see Licence to Grill) and which is its signature dish, to thank for that. The peri-peri chicken has helped the chain with 980-odd restaurants, which counts David Beckham, Justin Bieber and Jennifer Lopez among its celebrity fans, avoid the impact of the economic downturn. Profits rose from £31.5 million to £52.9 million in the year to February 2012.