Current Happenings

“The best way to predict the future is to create it”. Jaswanth Sai has proved to be a living and breathing manifestation of this quote with his determination and hard work. The Directorate of Entrepreneurship and Innovation is pleased to announce that Jaswanth Sai Idupulapati, a 3rd year BBA student, has successfully started his own food-tech company, Open Cafe, a cloud kitchen enterprise. Cloud kitchens are centralised, licensed commercial food production facilities where one to dozens of restaurants rent space to prepare delivery-optimised menu items. Jaswanth, an enthusiastic student of the Hatchlab Research Centre had started his business with an investment of Rs. 5000/- and today his turnover is more than 20L per month for a business that was started just three months ago!

“We invested Rs. 5000 and brought a van full of biriyani outside the main gate of our university. Hours passed and not a single sale happened. Those moments were not only depressing but also terribly demotivating. But as a leader, I had to rise up! We immediately changed the pricing strategy and shared the same via WhatsApp groups. In the next 45 minutes, we were left with empty vessels and a handful of cash. Profit was less; the learning and our confidence levels were mountain high,” Jaswanth excitedly mentioned about his first day of business.

As of now, Open Cafe caters to more than 1000+ students from SRM AP and VITAP, with quality food items that are delivered with a caption – 15 minutes delivery. Jaswanth has 15 employees and a big renovated kitchen, generating employment and thousands of satisfied customers.

His dedication and hardcore willpower allowed the materialisation of his idea into reality. Congratulations to Jaswanth Sai for his astonishing achievement!

A paper titled “Organic food preferences: A comparison of American and Indian consumers” has been published by Prof Bharadhwaj Sivakumaran, Dean- SEAMS, SRM University-AP, Kirubaharan Boobalan (SSN College of Engineering), and Margaret Susairaj (Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai) in the journal Food Quality and Preference having an Impact Factor of 5.6.

This research tests a nomological model predicting organic food attitudes and purchase intentions in USA and India. Data were collected from India (n = 687) and the USA (n = 632) using Amazon M Turk and were analyzed using structural equation modelling and multi-group moderation technique. Results revealed that over and above attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control, response efficacy and self-expressive benefits significantly affect consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions toward organic food among American and Indian consumers. Findings reveal that response efficacy and attitude matter more in the USA while subjective norms and self-expressive benefits exert a greater influence in India. Therefore, marketers may reinforce belief-related elements while selling organic food products in the USA and societal-related elements while selling in India. Theoretically, this work adds to the Theory of Planned Behavior by adding self-expressive benefits and develops a common model for organic food across samples in USA and India.