Cassia at Home: A Restaurant Brand Moves to Home Kitchens

Beginning with an ambitious, lean start-up effort in the highly competitive restaurant industry in Auckland, New Zealand, a husband-and-wife team built a small empire of successful fine dining Indian restaurants. Then came the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed their extreme vulnerability to external forces and the subsequent volatility of the restaurant industry. Their quick pivot to launching a line of Indian sauces for home cooks, Cassia at Home, was an instant success. As the couple contemplated different paths to recovery from the pandemic disruption, they wondered how they should expand their newest business into a sustaining brand and what the future of the existing restaurants would look like. Should they continue to expand the new retail business, abandon the move into manufacturing and broader distribution, or even focus on reviving their existing restaurant businesses?<br><br\><br><br\>An earlier version of the case was awarded Second Place in the 2021 John Molson Business Ownership Case Writing Competition sponsored by the Bob & Raye Briscoe Centre in Business Ownership Studies, John Molson School of Business, Concordia University.

This case is suitable for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on strategic management. It provides the opportunity to practice concepts such as global, demographic, political and legal, economic, socio-cultural, and technological (GDPEST), value, rarity, imitability, and organization (VRIO), and generic strategy while introducing other elements and factors shaping strategic decisions related to small business growth. The case features a contemporary example of the challenges to growth and sustainability facing small businesses; explores the risks and rewards of creating a new line of business in the competitive and volatile consumer packaged goods and prepared foods industry and compares these with risks and rewards in the more traditional restaurant industry; and exposes students to the many decision points family businesses face and their positive and negative consequences on a business’s long-term growth and viability. <br><br\><br><br\>After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to do the following:<ul><li>Identify market opportunity by examining GDPEST factors.</li><li>Describe the impact of generic strategy on market positioning.</li><li>Analyze the VRIO of a firm’s resources to identify its competitive advantage.</li><li>Assess the contribution of attributes to a firm’s past success and determine if these same traits will enable success in a new venture, using the Ansoff matrix.</li><li>Determine the options and implications of a firm expanding by maintaining or selling off existing businesses, adding to its corporate structure to support growth, establishing partnerships for production, becoming a manufacturer, or selling the brand to a larger corporate entity.</li><li>Weigh a firm’s opportunity costs and potential for sustained competitive advantage to determine its optimum growth option.</li><li>Explain the complexity of implementation planning for the proposed strategy.</li></ul>

• Entrepreneurship, Business Strategy