Domino’s pizza to expand across SL

Indunil HEWAGE

Ajay Kaul

The global food service industry saw a tremendous growth in the recent past, and the Indian based Jubilant Foodworks , who owns the exclusive franchise right to Domino’s pizza in Sri Lanka is ready to play a major role in the local food services and restaurant industry with its aggressive expansion plans across Sri Lanka in the years ahead.

Speaking to Daily News Business, Jubliant Foodworks Ltd,CEO Ajay Kaul said that we have high expectations on Sri Lankan markets following the end of the war. However, employment creation is clearly a challenge for the government and they should find new means and ways to employ more and more people to achieve set targets of the country’s economy.

Kaul said, “local organized retail sector has not got off to a sound footing in Sri Lanka or even in Colombo. The organized retail sector has a meaningful impact on food service retail industry anywhere in the world. I think that will happen in Sri Lanka if meaningful measures are put in place by the relevant authorities swiftly. The cost of creating a store in Colombo is very high. If we have to look at a site for our store,even in high street, most of these place are residential and laws of converting a residential area into a commercial place are not very conducive, it costs a lot of money to reconstruct them since the residential apartment is not build as a typical retail structure.

In addition, unavailability of food ingredients is considered one of the main challenges for us since there are hardly any manufactures in the food space in Sri Lanka. Almost everything has to be imported despite import duties on food ingredients. This puts an immense pressure on our bottom-line and profitability and so on. Ideally, import duties should be reduced in any case under the bi-lateral trade agreement within Sri Lanka and India to curtail the prevailing unfavorable impacts on the food service industry in Sri Lanka.