First Pizza Joint of Mahabalipuram:Pizza de Mama

History :The restaurant had opened about 5 months back in january.It is the first restaurant opened in mahabalipuram serving pizza.

Investment: The investment made is about 5 lakh rupees partly from loan and partly personal savings.

Owners background: Owner had a experience of 3 years  serving in pizza corner and had a French influence as his wife is French and had lived in Pondicherry, owner knew French/Hindi well.

Ambience: The restaurant is on first floor. 

First impression it gives is of cleanliness as

 people are supposed to remove their shoes/sleepers 

outside. The roof was covered with chaff and sides 

were open. Furniture was mainly wooden and lightning 

was light with lamps hanging. 

The ambience was typically French which was amounted further with French words written on the entrance.Few decorations were done to enhance the experience; Colours used were mainly red and yellow.

A Typical French Restaurant in pondicherry

Target audience: owner was mainly targeting foreign tourist typically from Europe and didn’t concentrate on local public and student’s community nearby.

Marketing strategy: owner’s USP while opening the restaurant was that it would be the only pizza serving restaurant in mahabalipuram but after 2 months of its opening, a new restaurant named “Pizza Hot” came in the same lane. Restaurant was in main market and various French words written around it to gain foreigners attention. Also names of the dishes were written on stairs to grab people’s attention.

Strategy of writing dishes name on stairs to gain attention of people

Food Menu and quality:  Food taste and quality was very good. Typically the menu was Italian consisting of pizzas,momos, lasagna etc .Both veg and non veg items were available.Few of the dishes like lasagna and varieties of pizza  are rare to find in mahabalipuram and add to one of the usp's of the joint

Pizza

Lasagna

Price and profit:Price was on a higher side according to the location,service and ambience provided.

Challenges faced :The restaurant was facing various issues:-

• Target audience was very limited and owner was barely able to make a break through as he had to pay about 15 people.
• Owner was closing the restaurant for about 1 month to travel to france which would mean whole loss of customer base and probable loss of employee base also.
• Owner didn’t have any expansion  plan and didnt tried to increase the target base to students and local public.
• Owner was sceptical about home delivery as local public made fun of it and no one accepted the order several times at designated place.
• Owner didn’t had plans to counter the competition.

Suggestions:

• Owner should try to diversify its business to students and local public and start home and college delivery in proper way.
• Price was kept according to price in pizza serving big chains like pizza corner,domino’s etc.Being first restaurant in mahabalipuram and seeing the target customers it should have started serving at a lower price,it would have increased its customer base to local public and students .
• They should start giving discount to students and regular customers.
• Closing of the restaurant will enable its competitor to gain pace ,it should be kept open by assigning to a temporary owner.
• Advertising should be done more .The restaurant didn’t appeared a pizza eating joint from outside.The banners should give a visible clue of pizza to public.

                                                                   Talk with Owner

Submitted By:Ratnakar Srivastava

                     FT13463