Abstract
Carasid, after a journey of 11 years, is at crossroads. The options before founders, Sunil Shrivastava and Christabel, is to run the business as usual or to strategically scale it up across Goa and beyond. Carasid is primarily involved in the production, marketing and sales of cake, pastry, breads and sandwiches. Forty employees were managing about 300 stock keeping units (SKUs). The founders of Carasid were worried as the demand for healthy products was increasing and cakes and bakery items were mostly seen as junk food. They had the potential to take care of this issue. One of the founders, Mrs Christabel was a nutritionist by training. There was scope for multiple interventions in pastry and baked products category in terms of product innovation, market access, supply chain management and marketing.
Carasid should strategically plan its next phase of growth. The case mentions that the demand of bakery products alone were growing at 10 percent. In this phase, the founder should focus on expanding across Goa before venturing into other states. These interventions by Carasid would make the business sustainable in terms of business growth.
Revisiting Existing Practices
Carasid’s business growth requires revisiting existing practices at regular intervals. The role-based recruitment should aim at developing functional specialization. Currently, Carasid grooms its employees for the generalist role. However, the generalist role works in small organization because as the organization grows, functional roles help to scale up the business (Pandey & Singh, 2012). Carasid also has to ensure that the various activities such as product testing exercise, mother time and college pocket survey, which it conducts throughout the year, leads to actionable results. Based on the feedback and survey results, it should experiment changing the product-mix. These experimentations can be run on a pilot basis in select Carasid outlets. The changes that exhibit encouraging results consistently for a quarter should be implemented across all the outlets.
The organization is hiring college students for part-time jobs. These students were also used for feedback and finding fast food trends in colleges. Carasid should also reach out to local hotel management institutes for hiring for individual short stints and in summers. Because it can be tough for the organization to attract many students for the assignment, if Carasid can get a few hotel management interns, then it would help to infuse more professionalism in handing operations and servicing customers at Carasid outlets. It would support the expansion plan of Carasid founders as most of family run businesses survived earlier due to high degree of professionalism (Pandey & Singh, 2012).
Product Offering Innovation
Carasid have to be innovative in their product offering for their next phase of growth. The product label of each SKU should have nutrient information. The information on the product package (label) would include calorie, carbohydrate, fat and sugar of that particular product. This would attract health-conscious consumers to Carasid. The case study mentions that there has been a perceptible shift of consumer preference towards healthy food products.
The organization should revisit its portfolio of 300 SKUs and stop making those SKUs that are slow-moving (least selling). It should also introduce new products at regular intervals so that it has a wide range of bakery, cake, pastry and other food products. Carasid should introduce a ‘Best Suggestion Reward’ for its employees. The suggestion could be regarding products, operations, marketing or any intervention that would lead to cost reduction, increase in profit or increase in customer satisfaction. The feedback of the customers can be actively sought, which can provide inputs for product improvement and ideas for the new products.
Online Marketing for Brand Building
Carasid had ambition to have presence across Goa. Apart from promotion on the traditional media, Carasid should have a strong presence in the online space. It should follow a ‘broad and deep’ strategy for their online marketing strategy. Carasid, being an umbrella (family) brand, should be present across social media channels besides using the search-based advertising (broad). However, Carasid can work more intensely in few channels, such as blog and Facebook (deep), as it gives better results in terms of the campaign objectives. Carasid can organize a ‘cake recipe’ competition, where the best recipe would be rewarded and also commercially produced and marketed by Carasid. It may also tie-up with online food ordering and delivery companies, such as Swiggy and Zomato, as they are quite active in Goa. Tourists also prefer these app-based food delivery options as they provide discounts on each order, and the tourists are accustomed to ordering from these apps. This would create a buzz about the brand and increase revenues of Carasid outlets in Goa.
Accessing B2B Markets
Carasid has a good presence in the B2C markets. However, the B2C market in pastry and baked products was a low-ticket category as units sold were less or the unit price per product was not large. In B2B markets, the order size was large. The founders of Carasid can leverage their corporate connections for accessing B2B markets for their product offerings in addition to focused B2B marketing efforts. One of the founders was a Chief Executive Officer of a large jewellery brand. Carasid can supply bakery and confectionery items for corporate parties. The option of having in-house canteens (run by Carasid) at these organizations would also enhance revenue.
Many organizations provide sweet or pastry packets to their employees on festivals such as Diwali, Holi, Id and Christmas. Carasid can supply products in bulk to such organizations. Carasid can also explore the franchisee model in which the franchisees source their finished products or raw material (depending on the location) from Carasid. It would also help Carasid in expanding to entire Goa in a short time span. The entry into the B2B market can provide job enrichment to the current team. The owners should devise a team of five employees (out of forty employees) to look exclusively after the B2B marketing of the Goa region.
The Way Forward
The journey of Carasid so far has been smooth and it has achieved positive results because of the hard work of the founders and their team. However, in order to achieve next phase of business growth and expansion across Goa, it should follow the unlearn–learn–relearn philosophy. It has to unlearn the generalist approach as compared with building functional teams for each key domains. It should stop the production of slow-moving SKUs and launch new promising cake and bakery products. Casarid should also focus on accessing B2B markets for bulk supplies. The franchisee model of Carasid has a large potential in terms of revenue and market penetration across Goa. The innovation in product packaging, by providing calorie, fat and sugar information on the product cover, would attract health-conscious consumers. An online campaign can build and popularize Carasid’s cake and bakery product brand and help in garnering brand equity for its products.
Carasid should undertake the standardization of different processes. The standardization becomes crucial in the expansion phase and more so, when franchisee networks are involved. The Carasid should create standard operating procedure documents for procuring raw material, producing products and delivery at franchisee location or to the customers. Accessing the B2B market requires employees who understand the B2B market dynamics and have been trained or have the experience in dealing with B2B clients. Therefore, Carasid should have a dedicated team for handling B2B markets.