Why waffles are trending

Instagram-friendly foreign bites like waffles, churros, and popsicles are changing the way millennials snack


Wicked Waffles is a small café and takeaway in Delhi’s middle-class enclave, Preet Vihar. It’s tucked away in a lane lined with clothing and jewellery shops, coaching centres, hair salons and a big Sagar Ratna outlet that has been east Delhi’s go-to restaurant for decades. However, one late afternoon, as we search for a quick bite, there seem to be few takers for dosa-idli. Instead, it is Wicked Waffles that’s pulling in the crowd.

All the tables inside are taken and there is a steady stream of people looking to pack their treats: students on bikes from an NIIT centre nearby, school kids, and even a fashionable lady who emerges from a VLCC outlet next door to take away little boxes of warm waffles sticky with chocolate, ice-cream and synthetic syrup. As we tuck into our own “red velvet” variant, it becomes fairly clear that middle India’s snacking culture is in the midst of a big change. Waffles are the new samosas or idli-vada or momos!

The last two years have seen a deluge of neighbourhood waffle stores across the country — from Ghatkopar to Ghaziabad, Hyderabad to Hauz Khas. Set up by small-time entrepreneurs, usually with no restaurant background, the business model is simple: open a tiny cafe in an area with low rent, buy basic equipment (a waffle iron for home use is available online for Rs 4,000; bigger ones cost Rs 15,000-20,000), don’t bother with a professional chef and rely instead, on off-the-shelf products like waffle mixes, Nutella, chocolates like

Kit Kat

or

Ferrero Rocher

, synthetic syrups, and yes, food colouring — lots of it. My “red velvet”, apparently a bestseller at most stores (with similar googled menus), just has red colour mixed with the batter.

A millennial audience is lapping it up. Waffles, even in weird paan and kala khatta flavours, are aspirational in a way samosas and jalebi are not, even if they have the same impact on the waistline. “Waffle stores are the new paan shops,” declares 27-year-old Nidhi Gadia of the Mumbai-based

Waffle House

.

Gadia, who studied in the UK, came back to Mumbai four years ago and was struck by the non-availability of the snack/dessert. Without any background in food, she started serving waffles — and waffles on sticks, which she says was her innovative idea before being copied endlessly — at various events, flea markets and pop-ups.

One of the pioneers in the business, Waffle House has seven outlets in Maharashtra. “When we started, people didn’t know what waffles were. We had to cajole them to try, saying we were making eggless ones and it was like jalebi. Now there are so many in this space. There is going to be a shakedown, as Indian consumers start discerning between good quality and bad,” says Gadia, who makes her own batter and sauces from scratch and is one of the few in the space to be quality conscious.

Most hole-in-the-wall outlets serve American-style waffles which use baking powder and not yeast which is used in Brussels waffles, which are thicker, lighter, crisper and made on irons with deeper holes.

Then, there are larger start-ups like The Belgian

Waffle Co

, perhaps the largest chain in India with franchisee outlets even in smaller towns like Siliguri, Vijaywada and Faridabad?.

It started out as a “garage business” run by young promoters? and claims to be on its way to the Rs 100-crore turnover mark. In the process, it is redefining the snacking culture of a millennial audience that may have never set foot in

Belgium

.

The world over, local diversity in food is getting replaced by more uniform food choices among aspirational young consumers who identify themselves as “international” instead of parochial. So it’s no surprise that “Indian fast food” has changed, as churros replace mithai, popsicles replace chuski, and toasties are edging out local traditions like the Bombay sandwich.

“The emerging culture is fuelled by young entrepreneurs who start by working out of homes, ??selling these bites at pop-ups and flea markets,” points out Saransh Goila, whose Goila Butter Chicken in Mumbai is a casual-dining startup targeted at millennials.

While most food fads die eventually, businesses that focus on quality invariably attract loyalty. In Mumbai, if cheese toasts and sandwiches — college canteen staples — are suddenly trending, it is largely because of the efforts of Nuzha Ebrahim of The Fromagerie, a little cheese shop. Ebrahim started out with toasties at small caterings, raising them from the ridiculous to the sublime with interesting cheese and flavour combinations. The inventiveness is applied to sandwiches, which hover in the same price range as Subway, but are far more interesting and gourmet.

The same principle of innovation plus personalisation is seeing other businesses gather steam. Pack-a-Pav has been popular in Mumbai’s younger partying circles for almost four years; owner Rohan Mangalorkar started it almost on a whim. He managed to get a stall at a beer fest and was looking for ideas for eats to sell when the brainwave hit him that his mother’s recipes for shami kebab and a basic yoghurt dip could come together with the Mumbai staple laadi pav. The result was a reinvented version of roll-meets-vada pav. With several outlets across the city and more planned nationally, Pack-a-pav is packing a punch.

Whether it is “global” bites tailored for the local palate or traditional tailored for global sensibilities, one thing is sure. India’s snacking culture is undergoing yet another churn.