JHONNY HOT DOG IS NOW MAKING IT'S NAME ALL OVER THE WORLD

Johny Hot Dog, an unassuming street food outlet in Indore, serves up the most-ordered dish on Uber Eats in all of Asia Pacific.

A string of global bigwigs commanded a big bite of the first ever Uber Eats APAC Restaurant Partners Awards 2019. Held in Hong Kong as part of the Uber Eats Future of Food Summit in July, the final award of the night dished up a moment of surprise: The ‘Most Popular Menu Item in Asia Pacific’ was not the Big Mac or pepperoni pizza; it was a vegetarian hot dog from Johny Hot Dog (JHD)—a 120-sq-ft stall in the small city of Indore, run by a 60-year-old, who had stepped on his first international flight to accept the global recognition.

JHD is one of the many roadside stalls across Chappan Dukan,Half of the store is partitioned into a delivery counter, especially for Uber Eats riders, and stacks of water jugs are kept alongside for them to quench their thirst, JHD caters to 3,000 Uber Eats orders a day on average, going up to 4,000 on weekends.

 How did someone who has had little interaction with American culture invent a version of the hot dog, back in the ’70s?

The making

“We had a cinema hall here that would play only English movies during my childhood, and they would sell such hot dogs,” says Rathore. “A lot of people here have learnt English by going there each night. Everyone would gather there after their work for the day was done, and we would often get a snack. That theatre shut down in the ’70s, taking its hot dogs with it.”

He says. My mother would cook for a living. I would watch her and think I could do that too. I always thought this was the line for me,with his mother’s help, Rathore developed the hot dog recipe—thick, soft, flat bread sourced from a bakery, with a tikki or cutlet inside.

Rathore set up the shop “in 1978 or 1979—some time after the Emergency”.

JHD began with three items on its menu and it is the same today, 40 years later. The three-line menu includes a mutton hot dog, the egg ‘benjo’, and the hot-selling veg hot dog.

The Tech Push

Demand has only increased over the years. When it started, JHD would open only at 4 pm, but now work begins at 5 am and the outlet opens at about 8 am.

With about 70 percent orders coming from Uber Eats; Rathore is now looking at automation. For the first time since its inception, Johny Hot Dog is looking to upgrade its operations. For one, it has invested in and is testing out an automation strategy. 

“It currently takes about 10 to 12 seconds to serve a customer, but the back-end work that goes into making the tikkis is still cumbersome,” says Hemendra. “They are manually made, so to get them to be consistent is a challenge. We would like to automate that process, and have demoed a machine that can make about 2,000 tikkis in 20 minutes, of a pre-defined size.”

In the meantime, JHD is set to open its second outlet, its first milestone in expansion, on the Bhawarkua side of Indore, from where a lot of Uber Eats order requests come. 

We thanks JHD for making it's name gobally and making the indori's proud.