Pradeep Kumar disrupted his own brand—and RollsKing crossed ₹100 cr

If he did nothing, RollsKing would bleed. This was certain. But if he acted, RollsKing might die. That felt almost certain.

There was no third option. And that was the problem.

By 2021, the North Indian roll market had plunged into chaos. Food apps pulsed with provocation. Buy one get one hogged the limelight. Flat 50% off lured the users. Free add-ons tried to sweeten the deal. In short, discounts dictated behaviour.

And what fuelled the madness? Free-flowing money. Venture-backed brands stormed the category with one instinct: grab ground first, explain margins later. Capital flooded in. Cash burned freely. Flavour mattered less than funding. Extra cash had become the moat.

RollsKing, however, had no such cushion.

For a decade, Pradeep Kumar had grown cautiously. Two stores in the first five years. Then a few more. Every outlet funded through internal accruals. No burn. No external buffer. Every roll paid rent before the next one was kneaded into the plan.

That discipline built the brand. Now, it cornered him. 

When the math revolted

If Kumar matched the discounts, the math would revolt. A self-funded business does not survive long in a subsidy war. He knew that. He had built the model precisely to avoid this dependency.

But if he refused, customers would drift towards cheaper options and market share would thin.

The thinning, in fact, had already begun.

When it started, it was not loud. It was nothing that would trigger panic. Just small dents in daily reports. Repeat customers testing other options. Percentage points slipping quietly. That’s it.

But small dents compound. And that thought refused to leave Kumar.

While doing nothing would protect the brand’s pride, acting could fracture its structure. Pride, he was aware, does not pay rent.

So, Kumar forced himself to consider what he had resisted for months: a second brand.

On paper, the logic held.

Smaller rolls. Lower price. A different name. No visible link to RollsKing. Let it fight in the discount trenches while the flagship held its ground. In theory, it felt like a masterstroke, one that would wipe out rivals without firing a single shot.

In his head, though, it felt like self-inflicted damage.

If it worked, the new brand would eat into his own stores, and business. If it failed, it would burn the cash.

“I knew I was about to hurt my own brand,” Kumar would later admit. RollsKing ended FY21 at a gross revenue of ₹17.5 crore. He was aware that his modest empire of ₹17.5 crore was set to be inflicted with heavy damage, either by rivals or himself. “The only question was—hurt it now, or watch it hurt slowly.”

He replayed both endings.

In one, RollsKing shrank under someone else’s fire. In the other, it weakened by his own hand. Either way, the wound would be his doing. It was a question of ‘certain’ death versus ‘almost’ death. Time was narrowing and Kumar had to decide which loss he could endure. “I had to choose the bigger fear,” he recalls. “To survive, I needed to disrupt myself,” he adds. 

It wasn’t the first time Kumar had stood at such a fork. 

Classroom or console?

In his third year of civil engineering, he had already faced a version of this choice. By day, he sat in classrooms that no longer held his attention. By night, he played music in Delhi’s restaurants and clubs. The crowd moved. The console responded. The classroom felt distant.

Result? Attendance slipped and marks followed.

Soon the dilemma hardened for Kumar. Stay in college, finish the degree, quiet the noise around him and silence the rhythm pulling him elsewhere. Or drop out, chase DJing and accept what would follow.

The young lad from Delhi grasped what that meant. Relatives would stop asking about his exams. Friends would move ahead. Parents would give up on him. The labels would stick: reckless, distracted, unreliable and hopeless. While the safer path guaranteed approval, the other offered uncertainty and freedom.

Kumar chose uncertainty.

Back in 2021, uncertainty didn’t knock. It hammered.

“They were burning cash and my business was on fire,” Kumar recalls.

So, he escalated. “I wanted fire to fight fire,” he underlines.

Rolling Fresh was that fire. A new brand. A tighter roll — six inches instead of eight. Same ingredients, same kitchen discipline but at a different price of ₹49, at least ₹50 lower than the flagship.

For bargain hunters, ₹49 felt like a steal. For curious customers, it lowered the risk. For Kumar, it was leverage.

Rolling Fresh carried no visible link to RollsKing. No endorsement. No fallback. If it stumbled, it would fall alone. If it surged, it would pull new demand into the system. The roll shrank and the intent hardened.

The gamble did not explode overnight. It stabilised.

Rolling Fresh opened quietly. Smaller format. Leaner footprint. Price-led positioning. The Rs 49 tag did what it was designed to do —pulled in customers who had drifted. Traffic began to settle. And then it grew.

By FY25, RollsKing closed at ₹85 crore in gross revenue. A month before FY26 wrapped, the group crossed ₹100 crore.Rolling Fresh now accounts for roughly 20% of total revenue--nearly ₹20 crore on its own. 

The ₹49 gamble & rewards

What happened to the cannibalisation everyone warned Kumar about? It didn’t hollow the flagship. In fact, it widened the funnel. RollsKing took nearly a decade to touch ₹17.5 crore. Rolling Fresh crossed that number in roughly half the time! The six-inch roll moved faster than the eight-inch original ever did.

Geography too played a strategic role. RollsKing deepened presence across 15 major cities with over 130 outlets. Rolling Fresh spread outward — into nearly 60 Tier-II and III towns, where price sensitivity runs high and repeat behaviour builds quickly.

What began as damage control matured into segmentation. This is how it panned out: Acquisition at the entry level, trade-up at the core, and premium capture at the top. “You find growth and magic only when you step out of the comfort zone,” says Kumar.

Kumar, interestingly, had a history of stepping away from stability.

Long before revenue targets and discount wars, he had chosen uncertainty over comfort.

In 2006, he co-founded a fashion buying house with friends. The business scaled quickly. European clients demanded tight shipment cycles, quality checks and zero excuses. A delayed shipment could wipe out an entire season.

That was the environment Kumar worked in. During the day, he moved between suppliers, fabrics, compliance calls and production schedules. Precision held everything together.

At night, he stood behind a console. The bass dropped and the room leaned in. Orders surged from restaurant kitchens lining the dance floor. Between tracks, he observed more than he performed — how quickly food moved, how customers reordered, how habits formed without instruction.

He built the business between daylight and basslines.

By his late twenties, the venture was nearing ₹80 crore in turnover.

The export operation worked. It generated cash, demanded discipline and rewarded execution.

Still, something remained unfinished.

Kumar had always wanted to open a bar. But the capital sat locked inside exports. There was no spare cushion for experiments. So, he kept dividing himself. Over time, the split stopped feeling strategic and started feeling like delay. 

Back to zero: Rock & roll

When he finally exited the export business in 2011, it didn’t draw noise. Expectations around him had already thinned years when he dropped out of engineering college. The silence made the decision inward.

He started again from zero. This time, with rolls.

The choice was emotional. Kumar always wanted a foothold in food and beverages. The logic, though, was operational. Rolls were portable, repeatable and scalable. They required discipline more than décor, and consistency mattered more than ambience. Those were strengths he already owned. So, the DJ moved into kitchens. The expectation was modest.

Reality was harsher. The first year brought feedbacks, not queues.

Customers called the rolls dry, chewy, oily. Feedback piled up and Kumar responded patiently. He reformulated sauces, recalibrated spice levels, handled dough--kneading time, resting time and layering--differently, fixed portion sizes, and tightened preparation time. The product improved, slowly. Sales inched forward.

For five years, RollsKing ran just two stores. Each outlet funded the next as there was no external capital waiting to absorb mistakes.

Then came the first turning point from an unlikely corridor.

Real estate major DLF was preparing to open the Mall of India in Noida. Leasing managers had been frequenting Kumar’s outlet and watching queues build without advertising. They reached out. A two-store operator secured space inside one of the country’s largest malls. Footfall surged, sales followed, and the street brand stepped onto a larger stage.

Growth, however, brought strain.

As outlets multiplied, inventory began to slip. Purchase orders stopped matching stock and margins tightened without explanation. The issue traced back to employee dishonesty. The result? Internal trust took a hit. “I was still steering like we were on a lake—calm, contained, predictable. I forgot we’d drifted into open sea,” recalls Kumar.  

Food for thought & pandemic

Expansion had changed the terrain for RollsKing. And this meant a new set of rules and a sharp reset.

Procurement controls were tightened, access was narrowed, monitoring was strengthened, systems replaced assumption and investments flowed into backend kitchens. By 2020, RollsKing had crossed 50 outlets.

The scale, though, exposed new fault lines. Only seven of those stores were company-owned. The rest--45--ran through franchise partners. And the next set of problems emerged from that. Footprint expanded faster than oversight, corners were cut and quality wavered. Some partners chased growth without guarding standards. Kumar wanted to pause and recalibrate but time didn’t cooperate.

Then the pandemic hit. The operating model stalled. Stores shut. Cash flow thinned. But fixed costs stayed.

The strain forced a rethink. When India began emerging from the second Covid wave, Kumar made a structural call. The franchise-heavy model had stretched control too thin. He shifted focus toward company-owned and operated stores.“You can’t gallop in F&B,” he says. “You trot. You canter. You build control first.”

Six years later, the pace looks different.

RollsKing has crossed ₹100 crore in gross revenue. Rolling Fresh contributes nearly a fifth of that. And a third brand has entered the frame: Roast.If Rolling Fresh brings users in and RollsKing trades them up, Roast sits at the premium end.

Arjun Toor, who joined as cofounder recently, describes it as a house-of-brands approach. “Rolling Fresh acquires. RollsKing upsells. Roast captures premium,” he says.

Roast began as a pilot in Gurugram last year. The menu stretches around the roll ecosystem — khamiri tandoori tacos, crispy shawarma, biryani — without drifting into pizza or burger territory. “We’re not abandoning the core,” Toor says. “We’re building around it.”

The strategy isn’t new. Auto majors and smartphone players have long operated through multiple sub-brands to target different price points without diluting identity. The logic is simple: one consumer, different entry points. The structure now resembles a ladder: Entry, core and premium.

For RollsKing, what began as a defensive move in 2021 has turned into architecture. 

Rolling brand out of a commodity

Marketing and branding experts describe Kumar’s run as patient — and deliberate. Fifteen years of bootstrapped, profitable growth have baked discipline and frugality into the company’s DNA.

What stands out is not just the scale. It’s the category. Rolls were never scarce. Like chowmein, they dominated India’s unorganised street-food economy. Entry barriers were low. Replication was easy. “Many tried to build brands out of it. Most failed,” says Ashita Aggarwal, professor of marketing at SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.

RollsKing didn’t.

Two levers made the difference: consistency and quality. A distribution-first model — especially via cloud kitchens — kept capital expenditure lean and expansion nimble. At the same time, visible high-street formats strengthened brand recall. Reach and recognition grew together.

None of it would have held without process. Standardised operations held the system in place.

“In food, quality is paramount,” Aggarwal says. “Multi-city QSR brands often stumble at replication. RollsKing managed to scale without losing control.”

The risks haven’t disappeared.

The next temptation is obvious: stretch the house-of-brands strategy too far. Enter adjacent categories such as biryani and the consumer base widens but the identity blurs.

“Such moves test your focus,” Aggarwal says. “Burger brands tried pizzas. Pizza brands tried burgers. It rarely worked.” Rolls remain the core. Drift too far and the centre loosens.

There’s also the danger of accelerating too quickly. While discipline built the brand, sustaining it at higher speed is harder.

Aggarwal flags another boundary. Kumar must resist the urge to chase pan-India scale too soon. “For food brands, depth matters more than width,” she says. Rolls aren’t pizzas or burgers. Regional tastes vary sharply. Replication gets tougher with distance.

Kumar, for his part, knows the balance is delicate. “In food, you don’t chase speed. You protect the base. If the base holds, everything else follows,” he says, adding that consistency can’t be rushed into. Customers can forgive delay. But they don’t forgive decline. “Every growth phase comes with a trade-off. You just have to decide which risk you can live with,” he says.

So far, his risks have been amply rewarded. The future, though, will test the dough again.