How Hotcha hopes to become the Domino's of Chinese takeaway
Chinese food over took fish and chips to became the country's favourite takeaway this year. But there is no national rival to the big pizza chains - yet
The Bristol-based takeaway chain Hotcha plans to go from 10 to 100 branches in the next three years as it mounts a “flat-out” assault to become the UK’s first national Chinese takeaway brand.
James Liang, founder and managing director, said he wants to compete with big pizza brands such as Domino’s and Papa John’s by aggressively franchising his model across the country.
The company – Britain’s largest Chinese takeaway chain, with a turnover of £2.5m – is planning 30 stores under its own name and 70 more under franchise by 2017, when Mr Liang hopes to list it on the stock market.
He said: “We started in 2011 with an aim of becoming the first national brand in the Chinese takeaway market. We wanted to be the Domino’s of Chinese.
“We knew it was going to be difficult, because there’s no one who has done it before and there’s no one out there whose business model we can copy.
“Now we are pretty much at the stage where we want to just go flat out. The aim is to have enough stores in the pipeline to be able to open one every month.”
Mr Liang, a businessman and chemistry graduate who moved to the UK from China in his early teens, said he had spent three years consulting with Chinese take-away owners and “taking apart every component” of the business to find a model which could go national.
Good Chinese cuisine is difficult to scale up or simplify, he said, because it needs complex wok-handling techniques to regulate temperature throughout the dish.That makes it hard to find qualified chefs, let alone train them from scratch.
Moreover, children of takeaway owners often feel they must rise above their parents' station and enter elite professions instead of taking over the family business.
To solve that problem, Hotcha established a single call centre and a central kitchen where sauces and ingredients are prepared in bulk in exactly the right amounts for given recipes. That leaves chefs free to concentrate on wok technique, for which the company has designed a six-week training course.
It has also appointed Andrew Emmerson, former business development director at Domino’s, as an advisor
. A poll in April found Chinese had overtaken fish and chips as the UK’s favourite takeaway
“Now we are pretty much at the stage where we want to just go flat out. The aim is to have enough stores in the pipeline to be able to open one every month.”
Mr Liang, a businessman and chemistry graduate who moved to the UK from China in his early teens, said he had spent three years consulting with Chinese take-away owners and “taking apart every component” of the business to find a model which could go national.
Good Chinese cuisine is difficult to scale up or simplify, he said, because it needs complex wok-handling techniques to regulate temperature throughout the dish.That makes it hard to find qualified chefs, let alone train them from scratch.
Moreover, children of takeaway owners often feel they must rise above their parents' station and enter elite professions instead of taking over the family business.
To solve that problem, Hotcha established a single call centre and a central kitchen where sauces and ingredients are prepared in bulk in exactly the right amounts for given recipes. That leaves chefs free to concentrate on wok technique, for which the company has designed a six-week training course.
It has also appointed Andrew Emmerson, former business development director at Domino’s, as an advisor
. A poll in April found Chinese had overtaken fish and chips as the UK’s favourite takeaway
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