India’s quick service restaurant sector is going through a quiet but telling correction. The numbers from FY26 tell a divided story — a tale of two streets, not one.
Restaurant Brands Asia (RBA), the operator of Burger King India, stands alone as the sector’s growth outlier. The company ended FY26 with 581 stores in India — a net addition of 67 stores year-over-year — with revenue from India operations growing 15% to INR 2,271 Cr.
Same-store sales growth came in at 4%, and EBITDA surged 33.2% to INR 132 Crore. Q4 FY26 was its strongest quarter in 12 quarters, with SSSG of 6.3%.
The contrast with its peers is stark.
Devyani International, the Jaipuria Group’s QSR vehicle and one of India’s two master franchisees for Yum! Brands, added only 9 Pizza Hut outlets in FY26 — against 63 additions in FY25.
That is an 86% collapse in Pizza Hut expansion in a single year.
The company has now announced zero net new Pizza Hut stores for the entirety of calendar year 2026, choosing instead to consolidate what it already operates.
Pizza Hut’s SSSG for FY26 stood at a painful -5.3%, with revenue down 1.6% to INR 720.6 Crore.
KFC, by contrast, continued to grow — delivering 14% revenue growth in Q4 FY26 and clocking 321 stores globally.
Full-year FY26 losses at Devyani widened to INR 42.5 Crore from INR 6.9 Crore in FY25.
Sapphire Foods, the other Yum! franchisee, mirrors the same diagnosis. Pizza Hut India revenue fell 7% in FY26 to INR 506 Cr, with SSSG at -9%.
Restaurant EBITDA margin for Pizza Hut turned deeply negative at -3.3% and the company added just 7 new Pizza Hut stores through the entire year, taking the chain’s total to 341 outlets.
KFC, meanwhile, held its own — with 73 new outlets added in FY26, a revenue increase of 11% to INR 2,113 Cr, and a best-in-14-quarters SSSG of 4% in Q4 FY26.
The broader Devyani-Sapphire merger — the most consequential consolidation in India’s QSR history — is now expected to close by end of FY27, creating a combined entity of over 3,000 stores with pro-forma FY25 revenue of INR 7,826 Cr.
Jubilant FoodWorks, the master franchisee for Dominos in India, bucked the trend entirely — adding 300+ stores across FY26, crossing 2,500 Dominos outlets in India, and delivering consolidated revenue growth of 19.7% in Q2 FY26 with Dominos India SSSG at 9%.
The headline, then, is not QSR degrowth across the board.
It is specifically a Pizza Hut crisis — two operators, one brand, and a shared problem: a proposition that has not kept pace with the Indian consumer’s rapidly shifting value expectations.
Editor’s Note
India’s QSR market is estimated at INR 45,000 Cr pa and is growing at approximately 18–20% annually. And yet, some of the most recognisable names in the segment are bleeding.
The Pizza Hut story is instructive.
It is a brand caught in no-man’s land — too expensive to be value, not premium enough to be aspirational.
At a time when the Indian urban consumer is simultaneously more discerning and more price-sensitive, a pizza chain that cannot clearly answer the question “why me over Dominos?” is structurally vulnerable.
KFC’s relative resilience — driven by chicken, a category India has adopted enthusiastically — and Burger King’s volume-led turnaround under new ownership suggest the sector’s fundamentals are intact.
The problem is not India’s appetite for QSR. It is specific brands failing to find their footing in a market that rewards clarity of proposition above all else.
The Devyani-Sapphire merger may well be the right answer.
Scale, synergies, and a single operator with undivided focus — that is what Yum! Brands needs in India.
The question is whether the merged entity can fix the Pizza Hut proposition before the window closes.
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