Mowgli Street Food

A high-profile CEO can add spice to a restaurant business but it needs other ingredients too: like the taste of the food it produces and the quality of the staff who work there.

Mowgli Street Food combines all three. It was founded in 2014 by Nisha Katona, the food writer and former lawyer who is often seen on TV cookery shows; the restaurants serve what it calls “the smash and grab zing of healthy, light, virtuosic herbs and spices”; and the workforce has helped it expand from the original site in Liverpool to cities including Manchester, Cardiff and Nottingham.

This large company, whose menus are based on Katona's favourite Indian dishes, has 11 branches with more planned, notwithstanding the challenges currently posed to the hospitality industry by the pandemic.

As an employer, it has a culture of making sure team members feel nourished, purposeful and fulfilled. It achieves this through its pay rates, benefits packages and wellbeing programmes.

Mowgli's mission of "enriching the lives of the cities we go to" applies to both staff and customers. A strong sense of purpose also drives the company's charitable arm, the Mowgli Trust, supporting three big international charities and the work they do in India.

Each restaurant also helps a local charity, such as Maggie's, Nottingham Children's Hospital and Bluebell Wood Children's Hospice in Sheffield, which the teams support through volunteering and fundraising initiatives.