Focusing on unique Indian cuisine, Annapurna creates customer base -- from scratch

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by Celene Adams

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Four years ago, with just a few hundred dollars in the bank, Yashoda Naidoo quit her $70,000-a-year job as a big-seven CPA. Then she wondered how to make a living.

She'd wanted to escape the corporate life -- but Naidoo is now at the helm of a $700,000- a-year, multi-award-winning,18-employee corporation -- Annapurna Ayurvedic Cuisine & Chai House, which has two Albuquerque locations and has just signed the lease on a Santa Fe property.

Naidoo has built the business much as she prepares her food, from scratch.

She started by preparing and hand delivering brown bag "Aryurvedic" lunches from her home kitchen to local Yoga studios, the Ayurvedic Institute, the Institute of Chinese Medicine, acupuncturists, massage and physical therapists, doctors' offices and schools.

"I had a lot of friends in the alternative health community," Naidoo says, recalling how she selected her target market.

They all wanted her homemade chapatis, cheeses, spicy soups and other delicacies, made according to Ayurvedic tradition -- an ancient Indian science of preventative health that emphasizes using organic, unprocessed, freshly prepared foods that are easily digestible.

On her first day in business, Naidoo had 13 orders for her unique lunches. Within six weeks, she couldn't fit all the food into her Honda Civic. "My business grew through word of mouth," Naidoo quips.

Realizing the extent of demand for Ayurvedic cuisine, "There wasn't even any "chai" [a fragrant concoction of black tea, cardomon, cloves, ginger and milk] in Albuquerque at that time," Naidoo recalls, she knew she needed a license, a health permit and an establishment other than her own kitchen.

So, after researching the demographics of various locations by visiting restaurants and reading real estate and building permit sections in the newspaper, she acquired a $20,000 loan through ACCI"N, signed the lease on a San Mateo and Copper location and started to reconstruct it.

"It was fraught with difficulty from the beginning. It took five months to remodel," she recalls.

The problems didn't end with renovation. The money she'd borrowed disappeared within a few weeks because contractors took advantage of her inexperience, she says.

Undeterred, she ran her credit cards up to $30,000 - only to discover, after the restorations were complete, that the building, at 1,400 square feet, was too small to both bake and cook in at the same time.

Naidoo had also made the mistake of underestimating her growth capacity. "I'd thought I was going to be a little mom and pop shop forever," she says.

The retail sales very quickly overtook her initial catering service. Within a year at San Mateo, she'd grossed $187,000. (Today, catering comprises approximately a third of her business.)

Naidoo's profits, she says, are largely attributable to her chai. She sells 100 cups a day of the steaming brew for an approximate 66 percent profit.

Other house specialties include her Masala Dosa, a South Indian crepe made with rice and vegetables, and wheat- and egg-free cookies, which sell for $3.75 a dozen.

Naidoo's customers loved her food so much that, 18 months after she opened at San Mateo, they asked her to consider a location close to the University of New Mexico.

But Naidoo was hesitant. Although she knew she needed to expand, she assumed rents in the area were out of her reach. Also, she still was conservative in her assessment of the potential market. "My product was not going to capture the average consumer dollar. People walked in the restaurant and said, 'What is chai?'"

Yet Naidoo knew that if she expanded her menu to include more baking and south Indian food, which she was unable to do in her tiny San Mateo kitchen, that her business would increase. So, she made the leap to the 2,100-square-foot Yale and Silver location. Having learned a lesson in restaurant layout from her first location, Naidoo also leased the 1,400-square-footbuilding next door for storage, built more work stations, bought double confection ovens, put in under-the-counter refrigeration units and arranged for the ovens and water to be on opposite sides of the kitchen to faciliate efficient kitchen traffic.

She also closed her San Mateo location and, nine months after opening at Yale and Silver, opened another space at Juan Tabo and Menaul streets, close to the Ayurvedic Institute.

Today, 67 percent of her business comes from the Nob Hill location and 33 percent of comes from the Ayurvedic Institute.

Naidoo launched a few other methods of securing revenue too. She imports Indian clothing and arts, offers dietary consultations, sells nutritional supplements and ayurvedic skin care products, caters and hosts chai tastings and fashion shows -- all of which now add up to 25 to 30 percent of sales.

And recently, Naidoo put in a "hot spot" for wireless computer users, a service she hopes will attract the students and "yuppies" who have asked for it.

Naidoo is as ingenious at staying true to her principles with regard to food purity as she is at creating a variety of revenue streams. For, despite the "thousands of dollars" it costs, she uses only filtered water in all her food products. And, although she could save 30 percent on her produce costs by ordering vegetables from California, she instead buys locally, offsetting the added expense by ordering spices from India rather than domestically. Spices that cost $17 a pound in the United States, cost $4 a pound abroad, she says.

Consequently, she saves anywhere from 100 to 400 percent on cumin, saffron, cardamon, and many other exotic ingredients, which she uses copiously.

"It's a big deal to get stuff passed through customs, but the menu necessitates certain ingredients and equipment," Naidoo says. For example, Naidoo imports unique kitchen equipment from India, such as a stone grinder that grinds rice into "dal" flour -- a traditional Indian method of bread making, and an urn in which to keep her chai at 135 degrees Farenheit so that the milk in it does not sour.

And every year, Naidoo visits spiritual groups in her country of origin, observing their kitchen operations and asking questions of the master cooks -- some of whom cook for up to one million people at a time.

Her strategies have worked. At the close of her second year in business, sales reached $600,000 and this year she projects she'll see $700,000.

Now Naidoo is opening a third location, in Santa Fe. Scheduled to open January 17, the 4,600-square-foot space will accommodate her long-term dream of opening a cooking school within the restaurant. "It's been on my agenda, but I haven't been able to get to it," says Naidoo, who, besides being the owner, is also alternatively the cook, dishwasher and baker.

Attaining this goal is somewhat ironic for Naidoo -- once a girl whose mother forbade her from cooking in hopes that she would go on to bigger things.

"Mother wanted us to be academics, so she didn't allow kids into the kitchen. I was locked in my room to study and meals were brought to me. I didn't know how to cook nine years ago," until after she married, Naidoo recalls.

But she doesn't dwell much on the past. Naidoo's energies are, instead, directed forward to her next venture -- vegetarian coffee houses.

"It's a totally different concept. I would like to have a vegetarian coffee house with organic beer, wine and coffee."

Ayurveda, the Indian goddess of abundance, doesn't sanction such libations, so Naidoo says she'd never introduce those items at Annapurna.

"But it will be organic. It will be fair trade," she says. "I get restless. I build something up and then I say, 'Let's do something else!'"

 

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