Oceancove

OceanCove founders, Rakesh Gupta and Satish Kapoor, need to decide on how to grow their business. Gupta is keen to get a better sense of the operational implications of increasing the size of each restaurant to 160 seats. In the last two years, OceanCove had grown from a single restaurant to a chain of five seafood restaurants located in Mumbai and Delhi. Because growth was an imperative part of the company’s vision, aggressive expansion was planned in the near future. OceanCove needs to find if the current operations the company has could handle the size of forty more seats, and what changes are necessary to be made to OceanCove’s operating processes.

The target market for the OceanCove restaurant consisted of young adults, ages nineteen to thirty years old, from upper-middle class and middle- class families. In India, this consisted of almost 57 million people. The general customers of OceanCove were typically students and young professionals who would meet friends or employees at more fashionable and trendy bars and restaurants. This targeted market was able to afford the luxury of trying out different cuisines, as they were more adventurous about food and different types of restaurants. OceanCove also tried to separate themselves by making their food a little cheaper than the competition, as cost was an important factor for their clients. The average lunch and dinner checks as OceanCove totaled about 300-700 Rupees ($6-$14 American dollars), compared to a typical high-end seafood restaurant where the price range was 500-1,000 Rupees ($10-$20 American dollars.)

The internal objectives of OceanCove should be to cut down costs of food and operations to be able to serve their customers at cheaper prices. OceanCove was able to do this by keeping cooking methods simple. By reducing the menu to grilled or fried seafood and by limiting the choice of sauces and seasonings, they were able to develop a formula that consistently brought out the best flavors...