Sometime in 2026, a cookware company called Wonderchef will file a draft red herring prospectus at a valuation of around eighteen hundred crore. The chef who co-founded it in 2009 is Sanjeev Kapoor. The same year, the country's largest cloud-kitchen operator — the company that owns Behrouz Biryani and Faasos — turned in revenue of fourteen hundred crore.
One chef's cookware line is being valued higher than the P&L of every cloud kitchen in India combined.
That single comparison is the thesis of this category. The Indian chef has spent three decades walking out of the kitchen. First onto television. Then into book deals and restaurant groups. Then into cookware and cloud kitchens. And finally, this year, onto an IPO road show.
The wave isn't slowing.
The patriarch
Sanjeev Kapoor was not the first famous Indian chef. Tarla Dalal — author of The Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking in 1974, who sold ten million cookbooks across her career and was the only Indian ever awarded a Padma Shri purely for cookery until Kapoor's own in 2017 — got there first. Madhur Jaffrey's BBC2 Indian Cookery, which put Indian food on British supermarket shelves in 1982, got there second.
But Kapoor was the one who treated his career like a business.
Khana Khazana launched on Zee TV in 1993 and ran for over seventeen years — still India's longest-running cookery programme. The restaurants came next: The Yellow Chilli, founded 2001, scaled to about seventy outlets globally before settling near fifty today. FoodFood TV, the channel he co-founded with Astro Malaysia in 2011, made him the only chef in the world with his own broadcast network. The Sanjeev Kapoor Academy followed — a culinary curriculum that begins in school. Then Wonderchef.
He is the only Indian chef ever to make the Forbes India Celebrity 100. He landed at #73 in 2016 and climbed to #34 in 2017. Industry chatter has him pricing his MasterChef India fees against Akshay Kumar — not against other chefs.
The blueprint reads in retrospect like a step ladder. Television built the brand. The brand built the restaurants. The restaurants validated the cookbooks. The cookbooks underwrote the kitchenware. The kitchenware is the IPO. Every chef who has tried to walk out of the kitchen since has been walking on a path Kapoor cut.
The new wave
The generation behind Kapoor went the other direction. They chose seriousness over scale.
The most quietly important figure in that generation is Garima Arora, who runs Gaa in Bangkok. Arora trained at Le Cordon Bleu Paris, then under Redzepi at Noma in Copenhagen and Gaggan Anand in Bangkok, before opening her own room. In 2018 she became the first Indian woman to win a Michelin star. In November 2023 — while pregnant — she added a second. Hers is one of only two Indian-helmed restaurants in the world with two stars.
She doesn't run a cookware line. She doesn't have a YouTube channel. What she did, alongside the restaurant, was set up Food Forward India — a research nonprofit that documents indigenous Indian ingredients and techniques. The Indian Accent generation built modern Indian for the world. Arora's project is to put the documentation behind it.
The third character worth pulling forward is the one who did neither.
Saransh Goila started as a television cook on FoodFood — a Kapoor protégé, effectively. In 2016 he and a co-founder launched a cloud-kitchen brand called Goila Butter Chicken. It scaled to roughly a hundred kitchens across forty Indian cities and a small UK presence. In June 2024, Biryani By Kilo bought the brand. In April 2025, Devyani International — the listed franchisee that operates KFC and Pizza Hut in India — acquired a stake.
That is the exit arc Indian cookbook publishing did not exist for. A TV chef built a delivery brand and sold it, in two transactions, to the country's largest QSR franchisee. The next generation of chef-founders is now pitching investors with that deck.
What a chef actually earns
The economics of being a famous Indian chef in 2026 break down roughly as follows.
There is the restaurant equity, which is where the durable wealth sits. There is the television and OTT judging fee — three to fifteen lakh per episode for top names, which adds up to between sixty lakh and three crore per season. There is the brand-endorsement contract, fifty lakh to five crore for a multi-year deal. There are cookbook royalties, mostly modest and occasionally large. There is the masterclass and digital income, which is recurring and which, for the chefs with real audiences, has begun to overtake the broadcaster fees. There is the consulting work — fifty lakh to two crore to design a new restaurant's menu programme. There are speaker bookings and wedding bookings, anywhere from five to twenty-five lakh per evening.
And then, separately, there is the cookware play — which is the part that scales.
Wonderchef is the proof. The company turned over four hundred crore in FY25 against a net profit of four to six crore. The IPO is targeted at a valuation roughly thirty-five times that net profit. The market is not pricing the kitchen aisle. The market is pricing the chef's face on the box.
The other chef-led empire that goes through the cookware aisle is the one in front of the camera. Ranveer Brar runs a six-restaurant footprint across Mumbai, Boston, Goa and Dubai; he has 4.1 million YouTube subscribers and brand contracts with Parag Milk and Victorinox; he commands seven lakh an episode on MasterChef India. The aggregate is real money and real influence, but no single asset is large. The empire is the diversification.
The two models are now visible to anyone choosing how to build a career. Kapoor scaled one chef-IP into one IPO-bound consumer brand. Brar scaled one chef-IP into thirty things, each of medium size, none of them filing a DRHP.
The next chapter happens on YouTube
The category's next move is the one that doesn't need a broadcaster at all.
Nisha Madhulika has been making Hindi vegetarian recipes on YouTube since 2011 and now has 14.5 million subscribers — she is India's richest woman creator. Kabita Singh, a former banker from Kolkata, has fourteen million on the same platform. Archana Hebbar runs about twenty million across platforms from Canberra. Sanjyot Keer in Mumbai has six and a half million, and last year became the second Indian chef to walk the Cannes red carpet — the first was Vikas Khanna.
These are larger captive audiences than Kapoor's prime-time Khana Khazana reach ever was. The chef keeps the margin. The broadcaster doesn't take a cut. The brand deal goes direct. The vernacular cohort — Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi creators — is doubling year-on-year, and the next million subscribers will be onboarded in a language other than English or Hindi.
What this means structurally is that the path Kapoor cut in 1993 — television to brand to restaurant to cookware to IPO — is becoming the long way round. The new chef starts on YouTube, builds an audience, sells a product, opens a room. The road runs the same direction. It just skips the broadcaster.
Thirty years ago, Indian food was what your mother cooked. Today, it's a category that the public markets are about to price. Somewhere between Tarla Dalal's first cookbook and Wonderchef's DRHP, the country decided that the people who fed it were worth listing.
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