Tarka Indian Kitchen CEO Tinku Saini on Embracing Technology
In the restaurant business, Tinku Saini has done it all: He’s been a host, a manager, an executive chef, an owner, and finally, a CEO operating nine locations across the state of Texas. Saini is the CEO of Tarka Indian Kitchen, an Austin-based restaurant chain that serves high-quality Indian food in a casual dining environment, bringing fresh curries, kabobs, and biryanis to your table in minutes.
Tarka hasn’t just survived the pandemic but wildly succeeded, with sales up 19% from 2019 to 2020 and up 17% from 2020 to 2021. Technology has been a key factor in the company’s success, Saini says: ”I’ve always been kind of a nerd when it comes to technology and data.”
At Sysco LABS, we build the ecommerce platforms Sysco customers like Saini use to shop for ingredients online. Every day, we’re striving to push the restaurant industry forward through technology. So, we’re always curious to learn from the most innovative restaurants about what helps them succeed.
In this interview, we asked Saini to share the history of Tarka and offer three pieces of advice for restaurant owners embracing technology.
The History of Tarka
Saini grew up understanding the power of food. As a child in St. Louis, Saini watched his mother prepare samosas and jalebis to sell at his father’s retail store, filling the counter with fragrant snacks and desserts.
”A whole Indian community formed from that store because there wasn’t anything quite like that,” Saini remembers. “I saw how much great food can really positively impact the people who come to enjoy it.”
As an adult, Saini had no intentions to join the family business, but he found himself taking a job at an Indian restaurant in Seattle to make extra cash. Again, he was struck by how flavorful, complex dishes became favorites among the community. The restaurant, Chutneys, took a contemporary approach to Indian cuisine with fresh ingredients and a modern atmosphere, elevating the experience of eating Indian food to something like a high-end Italian or French bistro. Saini quickly became a manager at the restaurant and learned the ins and outs of ordering, staffing, and service. When Saini’s cousins visited him at work in 1997 from Austin, they suggested Saini open something similar in the bustling Texas town. Soon, he did.
”We visited Austin and we fell in love with the city,” Saini says. What was an interesting idea in Seattle—upscale Indian cuisine—felt like a stroke of genius in Texas. “A lot of times on the East and West coast, things have progressed much quicker. So things that are evolutionary in those cities are revolutionary when you bring them to another context. There was nothing like that here in Austin: The restaurants were dingy, it was all buffet. There wasn’t anything that had the level of professionalism and ambiance.”
In 1998, along with his wife Rajina Pradhan and two cousins, Saini opened Clay Pit, a high-end restaurant in downtown Austin’s historic Bertram building. Saini partnered with Chef Maqbool Ahmed to craft North Indian dishes like curried mussels and racks of lamb, perfecting the recipes over time. Within a year, the restaurant became known as one of the city’s “prime fine dining locations.”
But by 2007, Saini and his wife were ready for something else. The grueling hours of the restaurant business had begun to take their toll. Saini and Pradhan sold the business to Clay Pit’s then head Chef Balinder Singh and began developing an idea for a string of fast-casual restaurants. The hours would be more stable, the menu smaller, and opportunities for scale unlimited. In partnership with the team from Clay Pit—including Chef Balinder Singh and business partners Kaval Bombra and Navdeep Singh—Tarka opened its first location in South Austin in 2009, greeted by a line of hungry customers wrapped around the block. Today, Tarka has nine locations across Austin, Houston, and San Antonio, with no plans to slow down.
”Our business has continued to skyrocket,” Saini says.
So what advice does Saini have to offer about leveraging technology? Here are three lessons Saini has learned about pairing innovation with delicious food.
1. Embrace personalization.
In the beginning, Tarka connected with its customers through an email club, Saini says. But growth was slow: “Over 10 years at Tarka, we got that club to be about 10,000 people.”
Then, in 2019, the company made an investment in targeted, personalized marketing, implementing a mobile rewards program and messaging platform to do segmented outreach.
“In less than 3 years, we have hit 68,000 members who we can communicate with on a very personal basis,” Saini explains. “[They] earn points for every purchase and can redeem them for rewards.” Tarka’s mobile rewards program and email marketing platform can be segmented by a customer’s previous orders, location, dietary preferences and more.
”We have a lot of people that come to us for vegetarian or vegan food, whether it’s for religious reasons or just dietary preferences. The last thing you want to do is send those folks a promotion for chicken tikka masala,” Saini says. “That would not be very appealing to them. So the rewards program we have right now allows you to do very segmented, very targeted marketing. People enjoy earning points and redeeming them for rewards. That increases spend and frequency. We can also automate rewards, like birthday rewards, or a free appetizer for joining our app.”
2. Be early, but proven.
When Saini is choosing software to incorporate across Tarka’s business, he has a simple rule: Make sure it works first.
“I like to be an early adopter, but I don’t want to be a beta tester,” he explains. “Especially when you have multiple locations, the implementation process can be excruciating. You want to make sure things go right. The technology that we lean into needs to have proven itself with other businesses and for some period of time before we adopt it. There are so many disparate systems out there, you need to make sure everything integrates.”
Saini prefers smaller software providers that are nimble, with team members that can answer the phone when he calls.
“Right before the pandemic, in 2018, I started to do a full review of our tech stack,” Saini says. “We looked at a lot of companies big and small for our rewards program and our mobile app. We chose to go with a company called Como. They were a smaller company, but they had already proven their technology with other companies, so again, we weren’t beta testing.
When you have 30, 40, 50 restaurants, you have a lot more leverage. But with a company of our size, it was important for me to make sure that I had the ear of the people at the top of that organization. I think it’s beneficial to partner with companies that listen to what we need, so that we can benefit mutually. Choosing a smaller company does require more work on the part of our team, namely myself, but I was willing to do that because I really enjoy the tech aspects of the business.”
3. Re-examine existing partnerships.
Even before the pandemic, Saini was analyzing the growing demand from third-party delivery platforms on his business.
“The year or two leading into the pandemic, we were seeing that our sales were really good, but our net margins were contracting,” he says. “Our prime costs—labor, cost of goods—were relatively stable. When we started looking at the P&L, there was one line item called financial services. There were two elements of that: Credit card fees, and third-party commissions. We saw how much more business was going into that third-party commissions bucket.”
Saini made a plan to create leverage and negotiate with the delivery apps.
“We reduced the number of partners for third-party delivery to a smaller subset,” he says. “In exchange for that, we got them to reduce our commission rate significantly. Even though we’re a smaller player, they could see the amount of volume we were doing on their platform, and it was off the charts. One of the reasons for that is because Indian food travels well. Curry is a sauce. Your packaging has to be really good, but it stays nice and warm, and continues to stew in those juices. Now, third-party delivery is 30-40% of our business at some of our locations. It gave us the ability to lean in, but only after solving for that net margin.”
Tarka is continuing to innovate today, with plans to continue opening more locations in Texas and beyond. At the end of the day, technology is only a tool to enable Tarka to do what it does best, Saini says: Spread tasty food and warm hearts.
”We do believe in the idea of being a positive karma generation engine,” he says. “If you give someone a great experience, they carry that glow outside of the restaurant.”
Want to learn more about the intersection of food and technology? Explore careers at Sysco LABS today.