Jaydeep Burman’s on a (Kolkata chicken) roll that won’t ever stop

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Mint’s Founder Diaries podcast series, as well as important business and life lessons for entrepreneurs. Like a million people in India, I am an engineer and an MBA and I was in consulting before starting what we now know as Rebel Foods. I was with McKinsey after my business school in London.

My daughter was just a couple of years old, and both my wife and I were thinking about where to raise her. That got me to take a sabbatical and come back to India and see what I can do here. And then Rebel Foods happened and I never went back to McKinsey after my sabbatical.

I am a Bengali. I was born and grew up in Kolkata, where I would say my earlier life was mostly around football and food. Within food, I was totally in love with the Kolkata chicken rolls and the egg rolls.

Every nook and cranny of Kolkata would have those. When I started travelling across India and then eventually across the world, I was always missing that. Then I saw the growth of burgers and pizzas.

If you think about fast food, a common element is the base or a wrapper and a filling or a topping. Pizza is a topping on a base. Burger is a filling within two pieces of bread.

And if you think about chicken rolls or egg rolls, they are very similar. You have a wrapper and a filling. So my founder and I were wondering why there wasn’t a chicken roll equivalent in fast food? Why was it not world-famous and why didn’t India have food brands at a national scale? Even today, there are five food brands that are in more than 500 locations, and all of those are imported.

We were the first ones to get there, I guess, from India. We were really passionate about food, chicken rolls especially, and that’s how our first brand, Faasos, came about. Then one thing led to