Name: I Left The U.S. For India And Built A $23M Burrito Business
Uploaded: 2025-04-29T15:22:15.000Z
Duration: 7 min 51 s
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Gerund

Coming to India to do business is a big learning curve.

First, India is a learning curve, then business in India is a further learning curve.

Past simple

For me, it was all about letting India be India.

If you find monotony dull, if you find comfort boring, then India is a perfect place to be.

I took it as par for the course that I would just have to adjust to this in order to be successful here.

I live in Bengaluru, India, and I moved here in December 2011.

So when I looked at starting a Mexican-inspired restaurant in India, there was just Taco Bell.

Even now, 13 years in the future, very few people have started Mexican restaurants.

Today, with California Burrito, we have 103 stores.

This journey from 1 to 103 stores has taken us almost 12-plus years.

When we started our first store in our first financial year, we did about half a million dollars.

Starting out in India was very challenging, but I never doubted that I had made a right decision.

And I think India has stretched me as a person, and it's really a wonderful place to be.

The apartment I stay in has three bedrooms.

It's a duplex, and it costs me about $1,200 a month.

And a lot of these furnitures also were my grandparents, so it's passed through the family and now really feels like my old house in the U.S. here in India.

This is where I take my coffee in the morning and look out over the small garden I have.

I have a large avocado tree right over here.

Now, it's not usually raining in Bangalore right now.

I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C., a very traditional, suburban, middle-class American childhood, I would say.

I went to the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

I had a double major in music and public policy.

I had the opportunity to study abroad, and I saw most people were going to Spain or Italy, and I'm a bit of a contrarian, and I wanted to go somewhere that was radically different than the U.S.

So I decided that India was the place to be.

Gosh, my first trip to India was just crazy in a sense.

It was so different than what I had grown up with.

I came out here with about 20 people on the study abroad program.

I was certainly someone who blossomed and was very comfortable navigating India, whereas most other people in the program weren't.

As an individual, I've always been somebody who's extremely frugal.

In terms of groceries, I spend anywhere between $150 to $200 a month.

Once I came to India, and then I went back, I never wanted to have Indian food in the U.S. again, because whatever I'd had in India was so good, and everything else paled in comparison.

On eating out, it's probably another $200 a month, maybe $400 if it's a very active month.

The challenges of living here is it can be frustrating to get things done.

Patience is kind of the right strategy usually.

The other thing is, knock on wood, I had actually not had any health issues, but last year I got dengue in August, and then I got typhoid in January, so I'd gone for 13 years with no problems, and then last year I got two.

So, you know, there are health issues that can arise that would not happen in the U.S., and these are not small issues.

All the people in our program were living with families.

One of my friends was of Mexican origin, and one day I came over to her house, and I saw she'd made this food for the family she was living with, and they were loving the food.

As soon as I saw that, I thought, you know, that maybe this was something I could do.

I could bring Mexican-inspired cuisine to India.

When we were raising money for our first store, we estimated we needed about $100,000 to do it.

We raised $250,000, so that was from friends' family.

Two of my childhood friends decided to join, and we opened in October 2012, our first store.

All of a sudden, it was clear that we needed to grow our own ingredients.

So in 2018, we ordered Haas avocado trees from California.

We imported them, and we planted them, about 500 of them.

Six months in, some elephants came through the avocado farm and trampled 60 of the trees.

The past 13 years, we've worked hard to make the food taste like you would get it in California, or taste like you'd get it in Mexico.

If you use the tomatoes from India, they taste very different than the tomatoes you'd get in the U.S., and the onions taste very different, the beans taste different.

So it takes a lot of time to develop the supply chain that leads to a food that, while is approachable for someone who's from India, is also differentiated from a flavor perspective.

So when we break down that $23 million revenue, our food costs are about 37% food and packing costs.

Our labor costs would be about 12%, and approximately 4% on marketing.

Real estate would be about 9%, and then corporate overhead would be about 5%, and we have other operating expenses.

So at the bottom line, you could say it's around 10%.

Our plan is to reach 300 stores by 2030, at which point we would probably list the company and do an IPO in India.

For me, living in India feels like I'm a part of this incredible once-in-a-lifetime growth story.

India is on a growth story that other countries have already gone through, and to be able to witness the transformation and change that people's lives are experiencing is really powerful.

I think it's also just a wonderful place to be from a life experience perspective, and I couldn't be happier to be here.