Startup Deep Dive : The Belgian Waffle Co — the Rs 1,700-crore waffle chain whose own filings show a fraction of that in sales

The Belgian Waffle Co’s own audited books, filed with the Registrar of Companies, show revenue of ₹328.7 crore for the year ended March 2025. Three months later, the private equity consortium that bought a stake in the company priced the whole business at nearly ₹1,700 crore ($177 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) — more than five times that filed revenue, and using a separate FY25 revenue figure of ₹450 crore in its own deal disclosures, a third higher than what the Registrar of Companies filing shows.

Both numbers come from real, dated sources. Neither is invented here, and neither is reconciled by the companies that published them. That gap is a useful way into the wider story of a waffle chain that went from a single mall kiosk in Mumbai to a nearly ₹1,700-crore business in ten years, survived a pandemic that shut down its footfall overnight, quietly gave up on being mostly a franchise business, and then handed a controlling stake to outside investors just as it was becoming genuinely profitable.

Quick facts

What they do

The Belgian Waffle Co sells fresh, eggless waffles made to order, sold mainly as a handheld “waffwich” — a folded waffle with sweet or savoury fillings that a customer can eat while walking, a format the founders coined specifically because an unfamiliar Western dessert needed to feel as portable and affordable as an Indian street snack. The menu has grown from nine SKUs at launch to around 30 today, adding waffle cakes, ice-cream sundaes and cheesecake-style waffles, plus hot and cold beverages at larger stores. It reaches customers through three formats — small mall kiosks, high-street takeaway counters and full café outlets — and through delivery aggregators such as Swiggy and Zomato, alongside a growing packaged-goods line of waffle and pancake premixes, spreads and waffle crisps sold through general and modern trade. The core customer, per the founders, skews female and aged 16 to 35, though the brand’s reach is broader in practice (Shrey Aggarwal, interview, Restaurant Times, February 2026).

The origin

Shrey Aggarwal was working in Manila between 2013 and 2015 when he first came across waffle stalls as a street-food category. What struck him was not the product itself but a gap back home: India’s organised dessert market had, for years, been dominated almost entirely by ice cream, with no equivalent Western dessert chain built for daily, on-the-go consumption. “Waffle as a concept attracted me,” he has said of that period. He returned to Mumbai and, with his wife Alisha Shirodkar, opened the brand’s first outlet in 2015 as a small kiosk inside INOX Cinemas at Nariman Point. The founding insight was as much about form as flavour: a plate-and-cutlery dessert would never work at cinema-hall or mall-kiosk footfall speeds, so the founders developed an eggless batter recipe and built the entire product around being eaten by hand, folded and wrapped, inside a couple of minutes. Shirodkar’s marketing and brand background shaped the company’s early digital-first positioning — built on visual appeal, customisation and the theatre of watching a waffle made fresh in front of the customer — well before “content-led” was a standard playbook for Indian food brands (Restaurant Times, February 2026; Inc42 company profile).

The struggle years

Two dated setbacks stand out, and the company has not hidden either. The first was the 2020 pandemic. Aggarwal has described the period plainly: store operations were restricted or temporarily shut through the peak lockdown months, pan-India material and logistics transport broke down, staff retention became difficult, and the company “slashed marketing budgets substantially and had to rethink the marketing approach” (Shrey Aggarwal, Social Samosa, January 2021). The brand says it avoided large-scale permanent closures — Aggarwal called it “lucky to have seen only a few permanent outlet closures” — but the disruption was real enough to force a pivot into direct-to-consumer ordering via WhatsApp and QR codes, and into the packaged FMCG line that exists today. The second, less dramatic but structurally more important, setback was a reversal of strategy on how to grow at all. The company initially leaned on franchising to scale quickly, in the standard Indian QSR playbook. After the pandemic, starting around 2021, it deliberately pulled back from franchise-led expansion in its most important markets to protect brand consistency, shifting toward company-owned, company-operated (COCO) stores in major cities while reserving franchising mainly for smaller Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns. In Aggarwal’s own words, “scaling yourself in this kind of business is a challenging deal… franchising is a much easier way to scale” — a pivot that traded faster unit growth for tighter control, and one the company had to actively walk back into rather than plan from day one (Restaurant Times, February 2026).

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after moment sits in December 2025, and it very nearly happened a year earlier under a different buyer. In September 2024, reports emerged that private equity firm ChrysCapital was in talks to acquire The Belgian Waffle Co alongside bakery chain Theobroma, in a combined platform valued at roughly ₹3,200-3,500 crore, with Belgian Waffle Co’s own price estimated near ₹1,000 crore against a reported FY23 revenue of ₹150 crore, itself up from ₹46 crore a year earlier (Equentis, citing deal reporting, September 2024). That deal did not close. Instead, in December 2025, Vixar (formerly Arpwood Partners), together with veteran investor Vallabh Bhansali and HDFC Asset Management Company, agreed to buy close to 45% equity in the company for ₹770 crore, valuing it at nearly ₹1,700 crore. The transaction was described as “largely secondary,” meaning the cash went mostly to existing holders cashing out rather than into the company’s balance sheet: founders Shrey Aggarwal and Alisha Shirodkar, Managing Director and CEO Ankit Patel, and existing investor Marathon Edge all sold part of their holdings, with Marathon Edge retaining an estimated 12-15% afterward (Franchise India; Entrepreneur India, both December 2025). The numbers either side of that one deal tell the real story: a company that priced at roughly ₹1,000 crore to one PE bidder in September 2024 was valued 70% higher, at ₹1,700 crore, by a different consortium fourteen months later — and for the first time since 2015, outside institutional investors, not the founders, became the largest and controlling shareholder group.

The money behind it

• Marathon Edge Partners — a Mauritius-based investment firm and the company’s earliest identified institutional backer, with a round disclosed around the 2021-22 period (Inc42 cites a round on 28 September 2021; Tracxn’s investor listing dates Marathon Edge’s first investment to 31 January 2022, likely reflecting disclosure versus closing dates for the same transaction)
• ChrysCapital — reported in September 2024 to be negotiating a take-private of The Belgian Waffle Co alongside Theobroma at a combined valuation near ₹3,200-3,500 crore; the talks did not result in a completed deal (Equentis, September 2024)
• Vixar (formerly Arpwood Partners), Vallabh Bhansali and HDFC Asset Management Company — announced December 2025, paid ₹770 crore for close to 45% equity in a largely secondary transaction, valuing the company at nearly ₹1,700 crore ($177 million) and giving the consortium a controlling position (Franchise India; Entrepreneur India; Agro & Food Processing, all December 2025)
• Post-deal residual holders named in the same reports: Marathon Edge (an estimated 12-15% retained), founders Shrey Aggarwal and Alisha Shirodkar, and CEO Ankit Patel, all retaining a minority of their prior holdings

No public filing or press report reviewed for this piece discloses a reliable lifetime total-funds-raised figure for the company, and third-party aggregator estimates for that total conflict too widely (from single-digit million-dollar figures to over $85 million) to be usable here; that figure is therefore left out rather than approximated.

How it makes money

The RoC-filed FY25 accounts break revenue into four lines, and the split shows a company still overwhelmingly a restaurant business, with a smaller packaged-goods line growing underneath it:

• QSR sales (dine-in, kiosk, café and delivery-app orders): ₹250 crore, 77% of FY25 revenue, up 60% year on year from ₹156 crore in FY24
• Franchise income (fees and royalties from FOFO partners): ₹19.6 crore in FY25, roughly flat against ₹19.9 crore in FY24
• Packaged/FMCG products (premixes, spreads, waffle crisps sold via general and modern trade): ₹51 crore in FY25, up 8% from ₹47.3 crore in FY24
• Other income: ₹6.3 crore in FY25, up from ₹4.2 crore in FY24

On the cost side, the same filing shows cost of goods sold rising 36% to ₹87 crore, employee benefit expense up 38% to ₹60 crore, depreciation of ₹35.2 crore, finance costs of ₹8.6 crore and advertisement spend up 37% to ₹5.5 crore, taking total expenditure to ₹282.7 crore, up 47% year on year (all figures per RoC filing, cited in Startuppedia, April 2026). The part people tend to get wrong about a fast-growing QSR chain is assuming costs fall as a share of revenue with scale; here, the opposite briefly happened — the company spent ₹0.88 for every rupee of FY25 revenue against ₹0.86 in FY24, meaning profit still grew in absolute terms (net profit up 26%, to ₹35.2 crore) only because revenue grew faster than that ratio implies, not because the underlying cost structure got leaner. The franchise-income line is the other tell: it has barely moved in two years even as outlet count kept climbing, meaning royalty economics have not scaled at the same pace as the footprint.

The numbers

Figures below are in ₹ crore, drawn from the sources named in each row; FY25 is shown two ways because the two available figures are not reconciled anywhere in public disclosure.

Sources: FY22 and FY23 from Equentis/Ascendants.in, both citing deal-related reporting (September 2024 and earlier); FY24-FY25 RoC-basis figures from Startuppedia, April 2026; FY25 deal-press figures from Franchise India and Entrepreneur India, December 2025. One plausible, unconfirmed explanation for the FY25 gap is that the deal-press figure includes system-wide sales across franchise outlets rather than only the standalone entity’s booked revenue, which is a common distinction in QSR reporting — but neither source states its methodology, so both numbers are presented here rather than collapsed into one.

Where the money comes from

• Format mix (as of February 2026, founder-stated): roughly 80% café outlets, 10-15% takeaway counters and 5-10% kiosks — a shift away from the kiosk-first format the brand launched with in 2015
• Ownership mix: approximately 340 company-owned (COCO) stores across around 40 cities, concentrated in major metros, against approximately 310 franchise (FOFO) outlets concentrated in Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns (Restaurant Times, February 2026)
• Channel mix: revenue is described as roughly split 50/50 between online orders (delivery aggregators plus the brand’s own app, WhatsApp and QR ordering) and offline, in-store sales (Restaurant Times, February 2026)
• Footprint over time: about 560 stores across 190 cities as of the September 2024 deal reporting; nearly 700 outlets across 250 cities per the December 2025 deal press; 700-plus outlets across 199-plus cities per the founder in February 2026 — the store count is broadly consistent across sources even where the city count is not, and the brand also has a small international presence in Nepal and the UAE

The surprise sits in the packaged-goods line: a business built on a fresh, made-to-order product now earns roughly 15.5% of its filed revenue from shelf-stable packaged premixes and spreads (₹51 crore of ₹328.7 crore in FY25), a vertical that did not meaningfully exist before the 2020 pandemic forced the pivot, and one the founders say they intend to grow toward 15-20% of total revenue over the long term (Restaurant Times, February 2026).

The risks

• Equipment supply risk: India has no domestic manufacturer of the specialised waffle irons the format depends on, so machines must be specially imported; their non-stick coatings wear out quickly and need costly replacement, and spare parts are scarce, a mechanism the founder himself flags as a real operational bottleneck on how fast new stores can be opened and kept running (Shrey Aggarwal, Restaurant Times, February 2026)
• Flat royalty economics: franchise income stayed essentially unchanged at ₹19.6-19.9 crore across FY24 and FY25 even as the company added stores over the same period, suggesting per-outlet franchise economics, or the royalty structure itself, are not scaling alongside footprint growth (RoC filing figures via Startuppedia, April 2026)
• Governance and control shift: the December 2025 transaction, combined with Marathon Edge’s residual stake, put outside institutional investors in a controlling position for the first time since the company’s 2015 founding, with the founders and CEO now minority sellers rather than controllers — a structural change that, in other founder-led Indian QSR chains, has previously shifted strategic priorities toward an eventual listing or trade sale rather than founder-set growth plans (Franchise India; Entrepreneur India, December 2025)

The takeaway

The transferable lesson here is less about waffles than about how to read a valuation headline at all. The same company was quoted, within fourteen months, at roughly ₹1,000 crore to one bidder and ₹1,700 crore to another, and its own audited revenue for the very year used to justify the higher number is reported two different ways, ₹328.7 crore or ₹450 crore, depending on which press release is doing the reporting. Neither figure is fabricated; both are simply drawn from different bases that nobody involved has bothered to reconcile in public. Before treating any single valuation or revenue number as settled fact, particularly in a private, founder-led company between funding rounds, it is worth asking which entity, which base and which press release generated it — because in a company this size, the gap between two “correct” answers can be worth several hundred crore.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded The Belgian Waffle Co, and when?

Shrey Aggarwal and his wife Alisha Shirodkar founded The Belgian Waffle Co in 2015 in Mumbai, opening their first outlet as a kiosk inside INOX Cinemas at Nariman Point. Aggarwal developed the idea after encountering waffle stalls while working in Manila between 2013 and 2015 (Restaurant Times, February 2026; Inc42 company profile).

How much is The Belgian Waffle Co worth?

The company was valued at nearly ₹1,700 crore ($177 million) when a consortium led by Vixar, alongside Vallabh Bhansali and HDFC Asset Management Company, bought close to 45% equity for ₹770 crore in a deal announced in December 2025 (Franchise India; Entrepreneur India, December 2025).

What is The Belgian Waffle Co’s revenue?

Registrar of Companies filings show revenue of ₹328.7 crore for FY25 (year ended March 2025), up 43% from ₹229.7 crore in FY24, with a net profit of ₹35.2 crore (Startuppedia, citing RoC filings, April 2026). Separately, December 2025 deal press cited FY25 revenue of ₹450 crore and EBITDA of ₹62 crore for the same year; the two figures are not reconciled in public disclosure.

Who are The Belgian Waffle Co’s investors?

Disclosed backers include Marathon Edge Partners, an early institutional investor from around 2021-22, and, from December 2025, a consortium of Vixar (formerly Arpwood Partners), veteran investor Vallabh Bhansali and HDFC Asset Management Company, which together took a controlling, close-to-45% stake. Founders Shrey Aggarwal and Alisha Shirodkar and CEO Ankit Patel remain shareholders alongside them (Franchise India; Entrepreneur India, December 2025).

How many outlets does The Belgian Waffle Co have?

Reported counts vary by source and date: around 560 stores in 190 cities as of September 2024 deal reporting, nearly 700 outlets across 250 cities per December 2025 deal press, and 700-plus outlets across 199-plus cities per the founder in a February 2026 interview, plus a small presence in Nepal and the UAE.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Startuppedia, “Founded by a Husband-Wife Duo, Dessert QSR Chain The Belgian Waffle Co Reports Rs 329 Cr Revenue in FY25; Profit Rises 26% to Rs 35 Cr,” citing Registrar of Companies filings, April 2026
• Franchise India Insights, “Vixar Takes Minority Stake in The Belgian Waffle Co in ₹1,700-Crore Deal,” December 2025
• Entrepreneur India, “Vixar Acquires Minority Stake in The Belgian Waffle Co at ₹1,700-Crore Valuation,” December 2025
• Agro & Food Processing, “Vixar Buys 45% Stake in Belgian Waffle Co for ₹770 Crore, Takes Controlling Interest,” December 2025
• Restaurant Times, “Shrey Aggarwal on Building The Belgian Waffle Co.: Scale, Strategy, and ₹450 Cr Reality” (interview), February 2026
• Inc42, company profile, “The Belgian Waffle Co.,” Inc42 Datalabs, accessed September 2026
• Social Samosa, “During the pandemic we slashed AdSpends substantially to rethink our approach: Shrey Aggarwal, The Belgian Waffle Co.,” January 2021
• Equentis, “ChrysCapital to Acquire Theobroma, Belgian Waffle in Rs 3,500 Crore Takeover,” September 2024
• Ascendants.in, “How The Belgian Waffle Co. Built a ₹46 Cr Franchise Success?,” accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, company profile, “The Belgian Waffle,” accessed September 2026

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