Ajay Kumar

I have spent my career on the operations side of large restaurant systems, where the difference between a good quarter and a bad one is rarely the recipe.

I started with Yum! Brands in India in 1995 and spent the next three decades in the parts of the business customers never see — operations for KFC across Asia from Singapore, global delivery strategy from Dallas, and then Chief Operating Officer of Pizza Hut India. Twenty-four of those years were international, across fourteen countries in Asia, the United States and the Indian subcontinent.

Most of that work was done through influence rather than direct control. A master franchisee does not report to you. You get the standards, the discipline and the numbers by being useful to them — by turning round the businesses that are struggling, and by putting in the governance that keeps a multi-unit system on plan long after the meeting ends.

In 2022 I left to build rather than advise. I run restaurants of my own now, and in 2023 co-founded Coffetea — specialty coffee in Chennai, a different category with a different set of problems. That matters more than it sounds: I am still running things, not describing them. Trinity Restaurant Brands is the third thing — the systems I kept wishing existed while I was inside somebody else’s. We build them, we run them, and then we hand over the keys.