Two Bakeries of Hyderabad
This is the real-life story of two famous and successful bakeries of Hyderabad. One is around 75 years old, with a baking experience of 100 years. Yes! That is what their cartons claim! The other is a typical rags to riches story.
We will examine the first one, as it claims some descendance from the “Royal Bakers” of the times of the Nizam, and the invention of the very typical and Hyderabadi biscuits – the Osmania Biscuits. Located near the Nampally Railway Station, the “SUBHAN Bakery” is perpetually crowded. The products, hugely and prominently displayed on several racks have a “shelf-life” of about an hour!!! This means that they are on the shelves for only about an hour, when the customers will come and pick them up; and the replacements promptly placed by the staff from the bakery, further inside.
One half of the huge store is for the sale of the bakery products, and the other functions as a consuming area of those products, if you wish to consume them there and then! And why not??? So appealing and delicious are their products.
Business is very, very brisk. Many times, you have to go there quite early; otherwise your favourite product will be out of stock; and the replacements may happen sometime later. Many people have taken their products beyond Hyderabad and the shores of our country.
But all attempts to make them expand and export, have met with a polite helplessness. And a consummate acceptance of their good fortune in such robust sales. Hence the need to go in for a corporate culture, inviting the duly associated corporate stress with that is highly avoidable. Isn’t it?
Now we come to the Niloufer Bakery. Legend has it that its founder, as a seven or eight year old, on reaching this ‘big’ city from his small village, was given succour by a kind owner of a restaurant near the Niloufer Hospital. This hard-working boy, on becoming a more hard-working young man, then bought that restaurant. And with intelligent working, bought more and more.
And then sent his son abroad for good learning. Fortunately, the good learning did not include a permanent, ‘Go West, Young Man, Go West’ theory. This young man, armed with foreign management degree, put all his knowledge to local conditions and expanded his father’s work even more and better. Good products need better marketing. And expansion of the outlets only brings in more and more success.
In our country, success also comes to keeping not only abreast with your competition, but also being in tune with the Rules and Regulations, which are only aplenty here. A cup of tea was for Rupees Five only; and two biscuits with it, were for Rupees Ten. Then came the Great GST Regime, which made the biscuits 18% costlier.
Quite a few of the guests stopped taking the biscuits!!! And so? What does our intelligent management of Niloufer Bakery does?
You can have you cup of tea at Rupees Five, and buy the two biscuits for Rupees Eleven and Paise Eighty only. Or? Have the cup of tea priced at Rupees Fifteen, with two biscuit free!
No!!! This is not what makes Niloufer Bakery great. The real greatness comes in making its products greatly mouth-watering and available universally, and on-line, too.
Zafar Iqbal