Salad Days to expand to Mumbai by year-end, enter B2B segment

Gurugram-based Indian delivery and takeaway food chain Salad Days, which meets at least 30 per cent of its raw material on its own,  will soon set its foot in Mumbai by the year-end and enter the business-to-business segment too. 

Salad Days, founded in 2014, delivers fresh salads with a part of the ingredients coming from its own farms and made at its cloud kitchens. The company operates in New Delhi, Gurugram, Noida and Bengaluru with the salads being delivered from its 14 cloud kitchens, including two central ones. 

Looking at new models

The start-up’s founder and CEO Varun Madan told businessline in an online interaction that the company is open to exploring newer models of selling things. “We are also innovating a lot on the menu and trying to fill in the categories where we are weaker,” he said.

Salad Days does not want to go and set up shops in corporate spaces, where employees buy. “That’s not what we want to do. We want to engage directly with the organisations, where they can purchase,” Madan said. 

Airports are one of the target channels of the company. We have not cracked anything yet and we have not met anyone there. We have set up a team to guide us on this,” he said. The start-up will look at hospitals, corporates, schools and salons too as “there is a lot of opportunity in these”.  

Salad Days, which is bootstrapped till now, plans to raise funds and has begun gathering data. “I just hired an investment banker.  We will be definitely looking at raising funds to expand faster because there has been a proof of concept,” Madan said.

Creating healthier options

Salad Days, which expanded to Bengaluru earlier this year,  serves around a million healthy dishes every year. “We have a big hand in creating healthier food options available. We are trying to create that in Bengaluru and replicate it in other cities,” he said. 

Salad Days, which has a team of 270 employees, gets 2,000-2,500 customers a day with 1,750 coming from Delhi and at least 500 in Bengaluru.

The company, which added warm quinoa high protein bowls with gravy two years ago in addition to soups and cold salads, started cultivating as a backward integration iceberg lettuce, loose leaf lettuce, curly kale, all the leaves that go into a salad, broccoli, napa cabbage and purple cabbage on its 3-acre organic farm in Vasant Kunj in New Delhi.

Salad Days also grows strawberries on its farm and supplies to the Oberoi group. Though the priority is to use it in-house, the company supplies to the hotel group in view of its long-term relationship with the latter, said Madan, who has a masters in business management and had no exposure to agriculture before starting the company.

The company’s CEO, who initially sourced the materials from New Delhi’s INA market and thought he had to pay more for yellow-looking lettuce when he was carrying out trials, said the company is open to exploring newer models of selling things. 

“We are also innovating a lot on the menu. For example, evening times are slow. So snacks and light bites are on the healthy side and we are looking to strengthen this and supply to customers,” said Madan. Customers mostly eat salads whose ingredients are plucked just two hours ahead of consumption.