FOOD COURTS: THE NEW SHOPPING CENTRE ANCHORS

According to a 2019 study, 40 percent of customers will choose a shopping centre based solely on the food offerings there, and nearly 38 percent of these people want healthy options. Getting people into the mall with good food often means they’ll spend more, too. Apart from this, transactions increase as much as 25 percent at malls with quality food-and-beverage options and shoppers who eat at the mall are spending up to 15 percent more per trip…

- Charu Lamba

What brings a shopper to malls? Great brands, excellent ambience, family entertainment zones? While it’s true that all of these factors are crowd-pullers, what really brings in the footfalls is a great foodservice offering.

Traditionally, shopping has always been associated with leisure and fun and no relaxed outing is complete without a great food experience. Be it busy high streets of Delhi or new-age shopping malls, food and leisure have always played an integral part in every shopping destination. The gradual progression of food courts in shopping malls is a testament to this. The evolution from a select few fast-food kiosks a decade ago to the vast variety of fine-dine options in malls today proves that food as a part of a mall’s eco-system has come a long way.

Talking about this in the Indian context, Arijit Chatterjee, Chief Operating Officer, Junction Mall says, “Those days are gone when malls were considered to be only shopping destinations.

We consider our mall to be a family entertainment zone and foodservices are a very important of what we offer – a natural crowd puller. Aside from being a major driver of footfalls, food courts represent an integral and even separate retail category today. In the last few years they have emerged as one of the major and consistent sources of revenue for malls.”

Speaking in the same vein, Yogeshwar Sharma, Executive Director and CEO, Select Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd. says, “Malls today are hubs of urban life. They are more than shopping centres. They have become destinations for experiences. They provide an option for outing for the entire family and cover diverse demographics; hence foodservice is very important in malls as that makes the entire experience a comprehensive one.”