From ₹52 lakh salary to momo carts: Gurugram man builds ₹5 crore food business, here's how

A 33-year-old Gurugram entrepreneur, Saket Saurabh, has left a corporate job paying over ₹50 lakh per annum to start a momo business, which has since generated more than ₹5 crore in revenue in two-and-a-half years.

Saurabh is co-founder and CEO of The Momos Mafia, a dumpling-focused food brand that now operates across seven Indian states.

Saurabh, an NIFT Delhi alumnus, co-founded Wowflux after graduating in 2014. After FlixStock acquired Wowflux, he worked there as a product manager and earned ₹52 lakh annually before resigning in September 2023.

His entry into food began while he was still employed. Along with his sister and brother-in-law, he helped run Bamboo Cafe in Gurgaon, where momos emerged as the best-selling item despite the cafe serving dishes ranging from parathas to biryani.

“It was a generic cafe. We were selling everything. As an experiment, we opened a small canopy selling only momos right outside the cafe,” Saurabh told HT.com in an interview.

The team then placed a cart at Gurgaon’s Infotech location. “That cart did great business. We were doing ₹10,000 to ₹12,000 in sales every day,” he said.

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How the franchise model began

The strong response from office-goers led to the idea of expansion. “We met many office workers at that stall who wanted to open their own momo carts. That’s how the franchising business started,” Saurabh said.

The Momos Mafia was officially registered in January 2024. It has five partners: Saurabh, Ekta Kumari, Gautam, Surya Prakash and Shubham Thakur.

The business currently operates around 40 carts, 20 small outlets and two quick-service restaurants. Saurabh said the early cart-led model faced operational hurdles, including cart removals, staffing issues and weather disruptions.

The company then shifted to a hybrid model, opening small shops with carts outside them. “We called it the CSR model — which stands for Cart Service Restaurant,” he explained.

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Saurabh said the business earned ₹16 lakh in the first three months of the 2023-24 financial year. It reportedly made ₹2.2 crore the following year and has already recorded ₹2.2 crore in the current year, with projections of ₹3 crore by year-end. “So in two-and-a-half years, we have earned more than ₹5 crore,” he said.

His Instagram video announcing the move—captioned “50 lakh ki job resign kar chale momo business karne”—has drawn nearly three lakh views.