Head of Cafe Business

Head of Café Business

The Role in One Line

Own the café as primary moat — the reason people come back, tell others, and can't replicate the experience elsewhere.

Core Mandate

Drive recurring footfall by making the café the most compelling reason for a discerning food lover in Delhi, Bangalore, or Hyderabad to leave their home and come to us — repeatedly.

Ownership Areas

1. Concept Development

This is the creative engine of the café — what it is, what it feels like, and how it evolves.

Responsibilities:

• Define and continuously evolve the café concept across all locations — the menu architecture, the aesthetic language, the sensory design, and the overarching narrative of what our café stands for.
• Build the seasonal and rotational calendar for the café — not just festivals, but food moments: mango season menus, monsoon comfort food weeks, global cuisine spotlights, producer collaborations, and limited-edition drops that create urgency and social currency.
• Own the menu strategy end-to-end: what stays permanent (anchor items that build habit), what rotates (discovery and surprise), and what's experimental (Kitchen Studio collaborations, chef residencies, maker pop-ups). Every menu decision should answer: does this make us harder to copy?
• Develop collaboration formats with makers, artisans, and producers — turning supplier relationships into café experiences (e.g., a cheese-maker doing a live pairing session, a spice producer walking customers through a curated tasting flight).
• Identify and develop hero products for the café that can become signature — items people associate with the brand and come back specifically for.
• Ensure every concept decision ladders up to a simple test: would someone drive 20 minutes out of their way for this?

2. Front-End Experience

This is everything the customer sees, touches, smells, hears, and feels from the moment they approach the café to the moment they leave.

Responsibilities:

• Own the physical experience design of the café floor — seating, lighting, music, temperature, aroma, flow, and visual merchandising as it intersects with the café. Work closely with store design but hold final say on the café zone experience.
• Design the customer journey within the café — from how someone is greeted, to how they discover the menu, to how food arrives, to the micro-moments of delight (a chef explaining a dish, a pairing suggestion, a surprise amuse-bouche for regulars). Map every touchpoint and make it intentional.
• Set and enforce presentation standards — plating, crockery, packaging for takeaway and delivery, branded elements. The café's visual output is its most powerful marketing.
• Ensure the café experience is consistent across cities while allowing for city-specific personality. Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad are different food cultures — the front-end experience should reflect that intelligently.
• Own the sensory environment: what does a café smell like? What does the ambient sound design communicate? These are brand decisions, not afterthoughts.

3. Service Design

This is the system that delivers the experience — the invisible architecture that makes great hospitality look effortless.

Responsibilities:

• Design the end-to-end service model for the café: staffing architecture (in partnership with the chef recruitment framework — Floor Chefs, Kitchen Chefs, Category Chefs), service rituals, speed benchmarks, table management, peak-hour playbooks, and quiet-hour programming.
• Define the role of chefs on the café floor — not as back-of-house operators but as front-of-house trust builders. Work closely with the Culinary Director to ensure the chef team is trained and empowered for customer-facing interaction.
• Build the service training curriculum: what does a café team member know about the products, the producers, the sourcing stories? How do they explain a dish? How do they handle a food allergy? How do they turn a first-time visitor into a regular?
• Own the same-day delivery experience as it relates to café orders — packaging, timing, presentation on arrival, and the gap between in-store and at-home experience.
• Design service recovery protocols — how to handles mistakes, complaints, and dietary issues in a way that strengthens trust rather than eroding it.
• Create and iterate on SOPs for café operations that balance consistency with warmth — the service should feel personal, not procedural.

4. Customer Experience & Feedback

This is the listening system — how we learn from customers and turn that learning into action.

Responsibilities:

• Build and own the customer feedback architecture for the café: what we ask, when we ask, how we collect it, and — most critically — how quickly we act on it. Feedback without a response loop is just data.
• Own the NPS or equivalent experience metric for the café. Set targets, track trends, identify city-level and store-level patterns, and hold the team accountable to improvement.
• Establish direct feedback channels: post-visit follow-ups, in-store comment mechanisms, social listening for café-specific mentions, and structured conversations with high-value regulars.
• Run a quarterly "voice of the customer" synthesis — not a report deck, but an actionable brief that identifies the top 3 things to fix, the top 3 things working, and one insight nobody expected.
• Own the relationship with regulars — build a system (not just personal memory) for recognizing and rewarding repeat visitors. Know who the top 50 café customers are in each city. Understand their patterns.
• Translate customer feedback into concept, menu, and service changes — close the loop visibly so customers know they've been heard.

5. Storytelling & Content

The café most powerful content engine. Every dish, every producer collaboration, every seasonal moment is a story waiting to be told.

Responsibilities:

• Own the café's narrative identity: what stories does th café tell? About provenance, about craft, about the people who grow and make the food, about the traditions being preserved or reinvented. Work with the brand team to ensure the café's storytelling is the sharpest expression of the brand.
• Generate a continuous stream of content-ready moments from café operations — chef table events, new menu launches, producer visits, behind-the-scenes Kitchen Studio sessions, seasonal transitions. The café should produce at least 3-4 high-quality content moments per week per store without needing external production.
• Collaborate with marketing on café-led content formats: short-form video of plating and preparation, long-form stories about ingredient sourcing, customer testimonial moments, "day in the life" of a cafe chef. Own the content calendar for café-specific social and digital channels.
• Ensure in-store storytelling is embedded in the experience — menu descriptions that educate (not just list), table cards that tell a producer's story, QR-linked content for customers who want to go deeper.
• Build the café as a platform for editorial authority — the café's content should position us as the most trusted voice on food culture in India, not just a place that sells food.
• Own the narrative arc around limited-edition and seasonal concepts — build anticipation, document the experience, create FOMO, and archive stories that build brand lore over time.

6. Business Ownership & The MOAT

This is the commercial accountability layer — the proof that everything above translates into a business that grows.

Responsibilities:

• Own the café P&L across all stores. Full accountability for revenue, margins, food cost, labor cost, and contribution to store-level economics. The café should be a profitable business unit, not a loss-leader.
• Define and track the core moat metrics:
• Recurring footfall rate — what percentage of café customers visit more than once per month? Target and grow this relentlessly.
• New-to-repeat conversion — of first-time café visitors, what percentage return within 30 days?
• Basket attachment — what percentage of café visitors also purchase from the retail floor? The café should be a gateway to the store.
• Content engagement — how does café-generated content perform in driving awareness and foot traffic?
• Customer acquisition cost via café — the café should be lowest-CAC acquisition channel.
• Build pricing strategy: the café's pricing should communicate premium without exclusion. It should feel like exceptional value for the quality, not cheap and not inaccessible.
• Identify and scale the café's unique defensibilities — the things competitors cannot copy even with unlimited budget: chef relationships, producer access, community rituals, cultural programming, proprietary recipes, and institutional knowledge about what this specific customer base loves.
• Own the café's role in membership and loyalty architecture — the café should be the primary reason someone joins and stays in a membership program.
• Develop a city expansion playbook for the café concept — what's standardized, what's localized, and what's the minimum viable café experience for a new store.

Success at 6 Months

• Café concept is clearly defined, documented, and visibly different from any competitor in all three cities.
• Recurring footfall rate is being tracked and showing month-on-month improvement.
• The seasonal and rotational calendar for the next 6 months is built and in execution.
• At least 2 signature café moments (a collaboration, a hero product, an event format) have become things customers associate specifically with our cafe.
• The service model is codified, the team is trained, and the front-end experience is consistent enough that a first-time visitor in any city gets the same emotional response.
• The café is generating 3-4 content moments per week per store, and at least one of those moments per month is driving measurable foot traffic.

Success at 12 Months

• The café is the primary driver of repeat visits to our stores — validated by data showing that café engagement predicts overall customer retention.
• Café P&L is on track or ahead of plan, with clear unit economics that support expansion.
• Our cafe is recognized — by customers, food media, and the industry — as having the most compelling café experience in premium food retail in India.
• A repeatable city-expansion playbook exists, and the café concept has been successfully adapted to at least one new location beyond the original three.
• The moat is visible: competitors are noticing and unable to replicate the combination of chef trust, producer relationships, cultural programming, and customer intimacy that our cafe has built.