If there’s one thing you should know about Hunger Inc.’s founders, it’s that they really fucking hate the notion of cooking with liquid nitrogen.

It’s that very same ‘allergic to bullshit’, laser-focused, context-driven, and thoughtful approach that's allowed them to transform the notion of what elevated Indian cuisine and hospitality can and should look like. Both founders, Sameer Seth and Yash Bhanage, contain multitudes as creatives and as entrepreneurs. Their love for travel, curiosity, tenacity, and thirst for adventure sets the tempo for everything their multifaceted team of professionals undertake every single day. It’s what’s allowed them to fundamentally change the face of India’s culinary landscape over the better part of the last decade. 

“The word context is something me, Yash, and the rest of the team think about a lot,” muses Sameer over a video call on a sunny winter weekday afternoon. “Modern Indian cuisine used to mean throwing liquid nitrogen at anything. That’s what people were used to. That was something we definitely did not want to do. It’s definitely been an educational journey that we’ve had to go through with our guests. Now what we’re known for is people who look forward to the innovation that comes in every 3-4 months with our changing menus.” 

Hunger Inc.’s journey started with the inception of the Bombay Canteen, founded alongside their Culinary Director — the late, great, Chef Floyd Cardoz. The Bombay Canteen took Mumbai by storm in 2015 with a menu that spotlighted the culinary diversity of the country, introducing seasonal ingredients and modern takes on regional cuisine in a way that still felt rooted and authentic. Unlike many of their contemporaries, at no point did it ever feel like they were appropriating or experimenting for the sake of experimentation. Every dish echoed the heartbeat of its regional origin and people. 

“All of us had these memories of growing up in places where the menu of what you ate at home kind of changed with the season,” explains Sameer. “None of that was being highlighted. That became the root that we planted for what eventually became the Bombay Canteen.” As they’ve grown, Sameer maintains they’ve realised they’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible when it comes to elevated regional cuisine in India.    

O Pedro, their second venture, took certain cues from the Bombay Canteen but packaged it into what is an emphatic culinary love letter to Goa and its Portuguese heritage, offering Mumbai a little slice of the signature warmth that can only come from the Indian seaside paradise. Veronica’s scales down and empowers the community found in a neighbourhood sandwich shop. It prioritises the tenderness of a hearty, wholesome, low-maintenance meal and coffee with your friends and loved ones over more ostentatious fare. Papa’s, on the other hand, brings Mumbai an intimate 12-seater chef’s restaurant to Mumbai’s denizens, serving up an array of experimental tasting menus that come straight from the imagination of Chef Hussain Shahzad. 

In 2020, Hunger Inc. The Bombay Sweet Shop opened its doors amidst the chaos and uncertainty of the COVID-19 lockdowns, with a vision to reimagine India’s confectionery traditions. Since its debut, the sweet shop’s bold, experimental, yet thoughtful approach has brought both an edge and a contemporary flair to the archetype of a traditional Indian mithai shop. Its roots have spread across Mumbai, and it's become the go-to for everything from housewarmings to office treats to festivals. 

When first conceptualising the Bombay Sweet Shop, the team strived to double down on their mission to celebrate India through its food. What they realised was that, at that point, people had been limited by having to walk into the four physical walls of a restaurant in order to experience this. “We asked ourselves: if we had to take the same joy and bring it straight to people’s homes, how would we do it?,” says Yash. 

The initial idea came to him, while waiting for a connecting flight at an airport in Turkey. A vendor at the airport, with a typical Turkish flair, attempted to get him to taste some Turkish delight. What struck Yash was that this man wasn’t necessarily trying to get him to buy his confection; he was merely trying to get him to taste it. A lightbulb lit up for him: he’d had an epiphany. He realised that when traversing Mumbai airport, you’d always see the typical duty-free staples like Toblerone or M&Ms or some kind of Swiss chocolate, but you so rarely saw a sweet, chocolate, or confectionery product that was uniquely Indian. He realised that they had the unique opportunity to do for Indian sweets precisely what the Bombay Canteen had done for Indian regional cuisine as a whole.   

The first Bombay Sweet Shop store opened in Byculla and was spiritually inspired by Willy Wonka’s proverbial chocolate factory of lore. They wanted to bring the fun back into Indian sweets. “The idea was for people to be able to come in and actually see how the sweets are made,” says Yash. “So many of us have been to France and are able to stand outside a bakery and see a croissant being made. But when was the last time you saw a Boondi ladoo being made? That itself is a pretty intricate art in its own right.” 

10 days after they opened, lockdown hit and the entire country was shut down. The Bombay Sweet Shop soon realised that it had no choice but to pivot to an online model. While making the transition, both Yash and Sameer wondered if people would believe in a sweet brand that they’d never heard of. Indian sweets in India have traditionally always come from places and people that we recognise: the neighbourhood sweet wala or a family member during a festival. They realised that if they tapped into the story and the emotional resonance of a particular sweet, they’d be able to overcome the barriers of separation that typically make consumers wary of newer stores. 

“Indian sweets are often looked at as something that you would consume at a wedding or during festivals,” says Yash. “We wanted to use our teams and our innovation to create a sense of buzz throughout the year. There’s a synergy between our brands where we can use the likes of The Bombay Canteen and O Pedro to test out our Bombay Sweet shop products. One of our most popular sweet shop offerings, the Coffee-Rasgulla Tiramisu, was tested at the Bombay Canteen for four years before we moved it to the sweet shop. Even when we create a tiramisu, we want to use our language of celebrating Indian sweets. The idea is to be able to create products with an Indian heritage that are modern in their overall makeup and fundamentally aspirational.”   

The Bombay Sweet show now has 5 brick-and-mortar stores across the city and 20 ‘dark stores’ that are dedicated exclusively to online delivery. These dark stores allow them to distribute to any area code in Mumbai from Bandra to Thane. 

This year, they are poised to take their next gigantic step into the stratosphere. Hunger Inc. has raised Rs. 215 crores in funding, with a view to bringing their delectable assortment of offerings to the rest of the country. Its rapid expansion and explosion in growth is a testament to how the group’s approach has managed to capture the imagination and palates of not just a new generation of Indian consumers but even culinary and confectionery ‘traditionalists’. 

A lot of the resonance they’ve been able to achieve has been down to the way ‘storytelling’ is interwoven into everything they do. Every ingredient, every menu, every social post, and every dish, is embedded with the imprint of a person, a place, and a memory from across the collective travels and experiences of the founders, the chefs, and the support staff. Their concepts aren’t disconnected or tone deaf  ‘marketing ploys’ that exist in a vacuum. They aren’t intangible and haughty concepts that alienate those who have never experienced them. Hunger Inc. isn’t ‘selling’ the idea of elevated Indian cuisine. Instead, they’re living it, breathing it in and expressing their interpretations of all they see.

Their creative tapestry draws on real people, real communities, and real stories, and their work embodies precisely what makes food such a powerful, all-encompassing force. Both founders see the often invisible threads that tie us all together through food and have made it their mission to bring these threads to the fore. 

“For us, it comes from an honest place; it doesn’t come from a trend we see,” explains Yash. “One of the things we do is travel a lot: to find new foods and find new flavours. When you travel, you find those compelling stories to highlight through your work, and that’s been the core of so much of what we do. Our content is naturally created in our stores, kitchens and restaurants. We don’t really need an agency doing it, and so that’s where that honest voice comes from. You can always use a trend to shoot a certain way, but if the underlying story isn’t honest, then you’re really just there to make up the numbers.”  

It goes without saying that such an ambitious mission statement would be impossible without the right set of values instilled in their teams, particularly as they scale. There are so many restaurants and bars across the country that have an arguably similar vision to Hunger Inc., but so few manage to stick the landing and ensure the same level of commitment and consistency. There’s a palpable distinctiveness across all of their offerings but there’s also an unwavering commitment and consistency with the original values that have made everything possible in the first place. Whether it's an attention to detail,  an energy,  an enthusiasm, a thoughtfulness or just a general magnetic vibrancy, it’s abundantly clear that everyone at Hunger Inc. is reading off the exact same sheet.

Sameer notes that, particularly at this vital juncture, their organisational values are something they’ve been looking at especially closely. While a hospitality-first approach is pivotal to everything they do, being able to showcase that on an everyday basis through teams that are spread out is what they believe to be the best way forward.  

“As we started growing, we realised that the initial teams we started with had also grown with us,” he says. “They had lived those values and were able to take those experiences forward with their own teams. It’s the same thing we’re trying to carry forward as we expand further. What was once instinctual has now become intentional. It’s great when you can have a conversation with every person on your team, but as we grow into teams of hundreds of people, it’s physically not possible for Yash and me to do that.”

Sameer underlines that their approach is constantly evolving and that both he and Yash strive to have consistent conversations with their leaders and their teams. Just that week, they were coming off a series of town halls with the Huger Inc. staff. For both of them, while morals can and will fluctuate, culture is something that needs to be deeply embedded.

As we head towards the end of our conversation, I ask them to reflect on the journey it’s taken to get them to this point. Are there any decisions that they think you’d approach differently? What’s the biggest difference between the vision of Hunger Inc. now compared to 10 years ago? 

For Yash, it’s the smaller mistakes or missteps that people don’t see. He points to a Bombay Canteen initiative called the ‘Canteen Bakery’, which was inspired by old-timey Bandra bakeries. The idea was to revive and modernise classic staples like a chicken pattice. Despite their best efforts, this endeavour failed. 

“That learning really came in clutch when it came to thinking about products for the sweet shop and for Veronica’s bakery. We learned that the mere act of putting up a display doesn’t mean people are going to buy our products. There has to be more to it, particularly from the perspective of storytelling.” 

One of their biggest lessons came with the Bombay Canteen’s now beloved cocktail book collectables. Before founding Hunger Inc., both Yash and Sameer had come straight from markets and cultures with a decidedly more spirit-forward approach to cocktails, and as a result, struggled to initially get the Bombay Canteen’s cocktails to resonate with people. “We broke our heads over this for quite a while,” laughs Yash. “We were paying a consultant and pulling out all the stops. We genuinely didn’t know what more we could be doing.”

Their ‘cocktail breakthrough’ eventually came from an unlikely source: their special pop-up Christmas menu cards, which were styled after the Archies/Hallmark cards we’ve all come to know and love. The cards piqued their patrons’ curiosity and compelled them to order the dishes listed. They decided to try and do the same thing for their cocktails and put together a Bombay-inspired storybook that brought the joy of cocktails to the fore.

“Everything’s gone well, and in hindsight — we’re glad we didn’t go bankrupt, and we can joke and talk about these missteps,” says Yash with a wry smile. “We wouldn’t be having this conversation if things had gone the other way. The success and the response we’ve gotten has been nothing short of heartwarming.”

What’s most striking about both Yash and Sameer is that, despite the sheer effort and intricacy that’s gone into building everything we see today, neither of them takes themselves too seriously. They’re also not content to rest on their laurels and are driven by the same hunger and curiosity that’s allowed them to succeed in the first place.  

“We’re big fans of going with what feels good to us in the moment,” says Sameer. “For us, it’s the context that matters more than the trend.”  

“I think it’s very simple: all we have to do is bring joy to people,” adds Yash as he signs off for Hunger Inc. “We don’t need to be teaching them what regional food is. They come here to enjoy themselves, whether they’re here for an office meeting, or they’re having a bad day, or they’re with their friends. Regardless of how much we put into everything we do, at the end of the day, our products need to put smiles on people’s faces.” 

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