The thing is that samosas are present throughout India, with every region having its own version of the same thing. We decided to take this most democratic of Indian foods and showcase it for all the attention it deserves,” says Amit Nanwani, Co-founder, Samosa Party. “Pizza, burgers, fried chicken, and other such pan-American dishes have these global presences and companies, and so we thought, why not do the same for samosa.
And after some research, we found two main problems with Indian street food and samosas: one, the perception that these items are tasty because they are prepared in an unhygienic manner; secondly, traditional samosas are not exactly an aspirational product which millennials will want to have,” continues Nanwani, who began the brand in 2017 with Diksha Pande in Bengaluru.
Having recently made its Delhi- NCR debut with three outlets in Gurugram, for Pande and Nanwani, this is merely the beginning. Samosa Party serves 15 varieties of freshly fried, made to order samosas along with a cornucopia of chutneys. Their focus is ‘to make Samosa Party a truly Indian brand that can scale across the world’. Over time the brand has performed well, given its gamut of samosa (“and chai, which is a perfect combination” notes Nanwani) and today dishes out two lakh plus samosas every month, making it the largest, and perhaps still only, samosacentric brand in India.
The brand’s vision in the next year is to scale across all metro cities in India and hit a mark of 15 lakh samosas per month in the next 12 months. What sets it apart from many other brands of its ilk is its dispensation of the human touch. “Quality control has always been a huge problem in the country, and so what we’ve done is automise as much as we possibly can.
We have standardised everything from the quality and quantity of dough used to make the cover to how it is folded to the oil that’s used to its size to the amount of filling.” What Nanwani is describing is the McDonald-isation of a product, saying, “It doesn’t matter whether you are in Bengaluru, Gurugram or any of our future outlets across the country. The taste and experience should be the same.”
Another thing that identifies a Samosa Party er samosa is that each samosa (you could make a drinking game out of the article at this point) is monogrammed with its fillings, be it cheese, BBQ chicken, or mutton keema, thus further distinguishing its machine-made superiority from those made for the masses by the masses trying to eke out a living. Indeed, Samosa Party uses technology for all its production processes.
At each of its cloud kitchens the focus is on providing a consistent product across the country with minimal human intervention. The brand has IoT (Internet of Things) enabled equipment used for processing the food at the last mile. Any recipe change in product, diagnostics, and inventory management can be done at the click of a button. I guess that calls for a samosa.