Costs Were Rising Everywhere. Sameer Khetarpal Cut Domino's Prices Anyway.

In September 2022, a man who had spent six and a half years building grocery and delivery businesses at Amazon walked into India's largest foodservice company and inherited a pizza chain that was quietly losing its pull.

Not a collapse. A slow erosion.

Rising Costs, an Unlikely Résumé

People were still ordering from Domino's. But demand was softening, and the ticket was being held up by price increases rather than appetite. Inflation was pushing cheese and vegetable costs higher, total expenses rose more than 18 percent in a single quarter, and the push into smaller towns was thinning margins further. The share price had slumped to a 52-week low in March 2022, when the previous chief executive resigned.

Sameer Khetarpal had never run a restaurant company. Hindustan Unilever. GE Capital. Partner at McKinsey. Then Amazon Fresh, Amazon Food, and Amazon Pharmacy.

He Cut Prices When the Textbook Said Raise Them

Every input cost was rising. The textbook answer was to raise prices. Most chief executives facing that maths would have done exactly that.

He did not. He cut prices instead, and then held them, keeping menu pricing broadly flat for the next two years while food costs kept climbing. He doubled down on Domino's own delivery fleet rather than leaning on aggregators, promising 20 minutes and pulling demand back onto the brand's own app. And he kept opening stores in small cities while the margins there still hurt.

The Turnaround, By the Numbers

By the September 2025 quarter, net profit was up 190 percent to ₹186 crore, helped by a one-time gain, and sales were up 19.7 percent to ₹2,340 crore. Domino's India had grown like-for-like for seven quarters in a row. FY26 group revenue closed at ₹9,512.5 crore across a global network of 3,636 stores, Domino's India accounting for the largest share of that footprint.

And Domino's became the first quick service brand in India to reach 500 cities. Not the biggest cities. The five hundredth one.

Every crisis makes raising the price look like the only answer. Sometimes the way out is to make the thing worth buying again.

The Boardroom Read

Khetarpal's path to this seat was unconventional by restaurant industry standards: an FMCG background, a stint at GE Capital, a consulting career, and an e-commerce operating record with no food service on the résumé. Boards hiring for a foodservice turnaround often default to candidates from inside the category. What he brought instead was pricing discipline from FMCG and a delivery-first operating model from Amazon, applied to a business that needed both.

The lesson for a hiring board is not that outsiders always win. It is that the skill a turnaround actually needs, in this case pricing conviction and last-mile logistics, matters more than a résumé line that says the candidate has run a chain like this one before.

The category on the résumé matters less than the discipline the business actually needs. Boards that screen candidates only by industry background risk passing on the leader who has already solved the real problem, just somewhere else.