Adyar Bakery Eyes Coimbatore
The Smell of freshly baked bread and bakery products wafts through the air as you walk past the foot of the flyover on Sardar Patel Road in Adyar. Started as a small 500-sq ft outlet in 1952, Adyar Bakery has now grown to occupy the first floor, and has added a supermarket (LifeStyle), an ice cream and juice outlet (Creams and Shakes) and Swagath for chat items. Today, it has 20 outlets, two LifeStyle and Shakes and Creams and five Swagath outlets across the city. Their own brand of packaged savouries is next on the cards and major expansion plans are underway. The company is eyeing outlets in Pondicherry, Vellore, Coimbatore, Nagercoil and Bangalore.Now a bustling shopping area, Sardar Patel Road (where the main outlet is located) had little commercial presence 50 years ago. The bakery was frequented by the residents of the area and the IIT crowd (the institute is located a few hundred metres down the road) and later, by wards of Anna University, when the varsity campus was established in Adyar. Good customer service is what Adyar Bakery GM, M Gopikumar, attributes to the bakery’s success. Competition is welcome, he says, adding that they have only grown despite more players entering the field now. “We do not issue any advertisements.
We have grown purely on goodwill and word of mouth,” he says. The main branch is in for a makeover and is functioning out of the first floor for the time being. “So far, ours was just a bakery and supermarket. Now we want to catch the market. The main branch is undergoing renovation and it will soon be one composite unit with a supermarket, bakery, a fast food counter with coffee vending machines, serving desserts and the like,” M Gopikumar said.
Initially selling just a few varieties of pastries, cakes, puffs and the like, the bakery today has nearly 200 SKUs. “Of these, around 80 products are those that we have been selling right from the start. Black forest and fresh cream cakes are some that people keep coming back for,” says LifeStyle manager TS Rajan. The company has a 12,000-sq ft plant in Peringudi that churns out all those delicious cakes, buns, breads, cookies, chocolates, pizzas and burgers, among others. The company has also upped its R&D focus. A lot of research happens on the health foods front.
“We have started using trans-free oil, for example,” the GM says. It has started segmenting its customer base and is looking at retail solutions to tap those segments: corporate & IT (counters at IT park and corporate food courts), institutions (in the form of taking on bulk orders) and supermarkets (setting up Adyar Bakery stalls). It is also mulling strategic tie-ups for both sourcing raw material and selling products in international markets. The bakery-cum-supermarket unit sees some 1,200 walk-ins daily with 100% conversions, Rajan says.
