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Shashi Catering Services: Serving Food with a Much Larger Purpose

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Shashidhar B Shetty, ChairmanBagging customer loyalty & trust is a herculean task, especially in an industry like catering services,where the rules & benchmarks are originally set by consumers. Abreast of augmenting menu cards with multifarious cuisines, catering them at economic prices and adhering to stringent food & safety regulatory compliances, there is an obscure factor that upheaves corporate catering from mere food service to a service that wins consumers’ minds, which is tough to measure, sometimes hard to find, and often difficult to define. Precisely, this embraces the story of Shashi Catering Services (SCS) - India’s largest proprietorship company providing food & facility services to corporate houses.

Well established today as India’s largest industrial catering company, SCS’ anecdote is quite interesting. Bootstrapped & marshaled by Shashidhar B Shetty (Chairman), who grips the company with his decades spanning versatile personal & practical experience in the field of Industrial Canteen, Security Management & Administration and Hotel Management, SCS has come a long way from where it began in 1992. It spread like a wildfire, from having merely eight staffs and Rs.8 lakh annual turnover in the initial year to accommodate 6600+ on roll employees and host an annual turnover of Rs.243+ crore in 2017. Commenced its operations with only one client, SCS over the past 25 years has won the trust of over 72 clients including MSIL, Hero, Coca-Cola, Honda, & Indian Oil Corporation, and several Defense, Remote & Offshore sites, offering a one-stop-shop for corporate Food & Facility Services and serving 2.5 lakh ‘happy meals’ per day across seven states (and growing). Indeed, besides 24x7 indoor & outdoor food services that include highly customized Employee & Executive Dining, Retail Food Services and Event Catering, it also provides value added services such as Cleaning Services, Business Support (Help Desk, Office Attendants, Concierge and much more), Vending Solutions and Hospitality Services.

Conceiving Consumer’s Priorities
Despite the secrete recipes that make the company’s foods tastier, SCS has no secret recipe when it comes to success, but offering highly customized and 100 percent indigenous solutions that are built by keeping customers and end-consumers in the center of solution’s design, following strong fundamental business ethics, and being 100 percent compliant (with ISO 9001:2008, Q-1391/09, ISO 22000:2005, ISO 9000 & 14001, ISO 9001:2015 & HACCP certifications) and ensuring its continuity. The company consistently identifies CBI (Critical Business Issues of clients), captures WITY (What is Important to You) from end-consumers to conceive their priorities, and eventually aligns the deliveries to help them achieve a larger goal. “Our clients (majorly industries and manufacturing plants) hire us to run their food services so that they can focus on their core business. In fact, we not only enable them to achieve this goal seamlessly, but also help them with business challenges such as building industrial relationships and motivation & retention of employees through our catering
services,” elucidates Shashidhar. Additionally, having a culturally strong Indian origin significantly helps SCS to connect with people in a better way. He adds, “Our services are popular with international clients and we have been specifically asked to cater to various international conferences in India due to our authentic Indian recipes along side stringent quality and hygiene practices”.

Despite the secrete recipes that make the company’s foods tastier, SCS has no secret recipe when it comes to success, but offering highly customized and 100 percent indigenous solutions that are built by keeping customers and end-consumers in the center of solution’s design


With burgeoning food poisoning reports from extremely hygiene-sensitive segments like healthcare centers and educational institutions emerging every other day, the sectors now recognize the dire need for a professional & hygienic approach. This is precisely where SCS pitches in with an extremely professional and scientific practice. It incorporates latest technologies and methods in food production, choosing nutritional values, and ensuring hygiene & maintenance of kitchen & store equipment, in addition to well-trained manpower and resource planning in all the solutions, thus assuring hassle-free services. This hi-tech-approach further combines with a process oriented & standard operating procedure (SOP) driven work methodology, and faster decision making (everything channelized directly to Shashidhar) to provide the company with caliber to cater sites with highest IR or Labor dynamics, and arrange outdoor catering services up to twenty thousand pax for conferences, meetings and annual functions.


A Successful Journey
Over the years, SCS has also built a seamless Supply Chain (hub & spoke model) that delivers quality on time, does transactions centrally with FSSAI certified vendors, performs centralized procurement management, awards vendor contracts on fair share basis, and thus ensuring cost efficiency along with supreme levels of safety standards. “There is no room for flaw in catering, and thus we plan HSE audits prior to empanelment of vendors and only empanel Sortex Certified vendors for key items like rice & pulses among many other practices. We also sign all the risk compliance agreements with our vendors, which includes protection against disruption; BCP and Code of Business Conduct agreement among others,” asserts Shashidhar.

Moving towards a completely tech-savvy epoch, SCS is second to none in ensuring the involvement of latest technologies in all its service points either starting from providing end-consumers with latest online payments & SCS digital wallet to automating the entire in-house process through a robust IT platform. Recently, the company has also come up with an Integrated Digital Cafe that comprises Self Ordering kiosks, Digital menu boards, Mobile App
and automated Kitchen Management (Order Notification & Fulfillment) to rescue end-consumers from queues. SCS proffers its workforce with quality training on all these technologies, which ensures the smooth flow of the process and maximum benefits to the customers & end-consumers. “We have a skilled team of qualified professionals who poses at least 15 years of professional experience and understand the challenges of the catering industry and form as a robust governance to drive the process, operations, HR, purchase and client engagement, which over the years has helped us to come up with innovative & sustainable style of working,” adjoins Shashidhar.

Traveling Abreast of Time
While ensuring utmost gravity on adhering to regulatory compliance and maintaining the quality standards, SCS also perceives the imperativeness to keep abreast of the ever growing technologies, which accounts for company being one of the progressive & well-established firms in the catering business and in turn also steers it on a rapid growth track. Having set broad geographical expansion blueprints, the company today is racing towards Rs.500 crore turnover to achieve it within five years from now. On the way, SCS is genuinely looking forward to acquire industries/services which are going to act as catalyst in achieving this target.

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Key Management:
Shashidhar B Shetty, Chairman
Renowned as SBS, Shashidhar has versatile personal & practical experience in the field of Industrial Canteen, Security Management & Administration and Hotel Management. Through channelizing all the decisions makings directly towards him, Shashidhar plays an instrumental role in SCS manifesting super-fast planning and execution.

Offerings:
• Food Services
• Cleaning Services
• Business Support
• Vending Solutions
• Hospitality Services

Offices: Baroda (Headquarter), Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam and Bangalore

Case Study
It was in the year 2012; MSIL (Maruti Suzuki India Limited) traced multifarious flaws in their contracted in-house food service in one of their plants in Haryana, ranging from less employee-penetration in cafeterias to compliance & legal issues. Being the ruler of Indian roads, they couldn’t afford anything below world-class standard, and thus, post an intricate market research and due diligence, they outsourced the vexation to Shashi Catering Services (SCS) - India’s largest proprietorship company providing food & facility services to corporate houses, and rest of the anecdote is a history.

Despite having no geographical strength in Haryana, SCS renovated & mobilized India’s biggest canteen food services in just seven days, tailor-made menus by taking feedback from employees, and in turn drove MSIL to increase productivity by achieving 80-90 percent employee-penetration in plant-cafeterias. “Initially the vendors & suppliers didn’t support us for raw material purchase, so we sent around eight containers from Baroda full of groceries and raw materials to sustain the material supplies,” asserts Shashidhar B Shetty, Chairman, SCS. Besides an overwhelming testimony, completion of this herculean task resulted in SCS securing catering services for other MSIL plants in shut-eye time, and today, it has over 450 (out of 6,000+) staffs taking care of 27,500 MSIL employees.