After running over 500 Wow! Momo stores across 27 Indian cities over the last 15 years, the company has created a unified format – Wow! Eats. The first store opened in Chennai recently and plans to open more outlets at Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar and Kolkata. The company had earlier conceptualised Wow! Chicken, an Indianised version of serving grilled and fried chicken and Wow! China, specialising in Indianised Chinese food. The packed Momos ready to eat (RTE) is now available at leading modern retail stores across India.
The company is also planning to launch a digital app – Wow! Eats which will directly serve customers from the nearest stores. The new concept of Wow! Eats physical stores will combine the three existing formats. It is not clear whether the new digital ordering format will deliver through its own delivery fleet or would lean for last mile support on food tech apps like Dunzo / Zomato and Swiggy.
Sagar Daryani, CEO & Co-Founder, Wow! Momo Foods said “We believe that consumers want diversity of taste through unity of window; the future is not about owning share of marketplace; rather it is going to be owning share of stomach through multiple branded occasions; Wow! Eats brings these multiple occasions of eating out to a single place & a Wow! experience”.
Mr. Murali Krishnan, Co-founder and CMO atWow!Momo Foods explains, “With Wow! Eats, we’re on a mission to enter the pure platform play; tripling our might and machinery to give consumers a diverse choice and strategically own larger share of the stomach”.
The company has an annual turnover run-rate of ₹450 Cr and is planning to add 100 new stores in FY 23-24. The move to unify the three formats is expected to bring cost benefits to the QSR chain since the backend equipment and staff remain common and constant to the fare. The new format will also focus on a dine-in experience at malls rather than being a takeaway counter within the foodcourts. With a steep increase in real estate costs, especially at Malls, the company could probably be rationalising the business model by combining multiple formats to build better synergies.
The organised QSR market in India is estimated to be ₹5,600 Cr (US $ 690 mn) in 2022 and Wow! Food’s could be gunning a significant share being one of the largest Indian food operator in the space which is dominated by the likes of McDonalds, Dominos, Pizzaa Hut, Subway, etc.
The company has already raised ₹560 Cr (US $ 70 mn) from Investors amd could be headed for an IPO in FY 24-25. As per Fintrackr’s estimates, Wow! Momo had raised a fresh investment of ₹125 Cr ( US $ 16 mn) in Sep. ‘22 at a valuation of $270 million or Rs 2,130 crore.
