Indian street food and café brand, Chaiiwala, is expanding its partnership with Roadchef with the opening of an express format café at Sandbach Southbound Services on the M6.
The new 320sq ft café builds on the successful trial of Chaiiwala’s first motorway location at Watford Gap Services in 2025. It also supports the company’s strategy to expand the brand through opening diverse formats in high-footfall, on-the-go locations.
The café is the first of six new container openings planned at Roadchef service stations.
Sandbach is a bigger version of the set up at Watford Gap. It brings two containers together, doubling operational capacity and creating more space for the team to serve customers on the go. It is also more permanent and visible, with a full kitchen operation. This means Chaiiwala can offer a broader range of products while maintaining the speed and convenience needed in a motorway services location.
Sohail Alimohamed, co-founder of Chaiiwala, says: “The first Chaiiwala motorway services location with Roadchef at Watford Gap was a good opportunity for both businesses to test something new in the travel hub space. For Roadchef, it added more choice and variety for customers, and for us, it gave us the chance to trial a more compact format in a high-footfall, on-the-go location.
“We already knew Chaiiwala could work well in travel environments from our airport sites, but Watford Gap allowed us to understand how customers would respond to our food and chaii in a motorway services setting.”
Alimohamed says one of the key learnings from Watford Gap was that a focused, core menu worked well in this setting. “It allows us to serve customers quickly and efficiently, while still offering the products Chaiiwala is best known for. It also showed there is strong demand for a flavourful and distinctive alternative to more traditional service station options.
“The success of that trial has given us the confidence to expand the partnership with Roadchef, starting with Sandbach Southbound and with further container openings planned this year.”
The menu has been tailored for customers travelling on the road, with hot and cold drinks as well as Indian street food items including wraps, rice bowls, Bombay Toasties and sweet treats.
Dan Sutton, brands director at Roadchef, says: “We’re committed to giving our customers more choice every time they stop with us, and Chaiiwala is a fantastic addition to Sandbach Southbound. As we continue to diversify our food and drink offering, we’re introducing exciting new brands that reflect the variety of tastes and preferences of the millions of people who travel on the UK’s motorway network each year.”
Chaiiwala currently has 115 sites across the UK, more than 20 in Canada and a handful in Dubai. It hopes to grow its numbers across high streets, drive-thrus, travel hubs, non-traditional formats and international markets. The ambition is to scale to 500 global locations over the next 10 years.
“Forecourts and motorway service stations are a really exciting opportunity for Chaiiwala,” says Alimohamed. “Our strategy is to make Indian street food and Karak chaii more accessible, and travel hubs allow us to do that in high-footfall locations where customers are actively looking for convenient, good quality food and drink.”
