Maruti Suzuki wanted a meaningful presence at Grubfest, one of Delhi’s most popular youth food festivals. But as an automobile brand, it had no natural connection to the food space. So I decided to flip the challenge into an opportunity. Drawing from the brand’s heritage across India and Japan, I came up with the idea of creating the Auto-Café — a first-of-its-kind pop-up that blended car culture with culinary culture in an unexpected, memorable way.

The space was built using repurposed car parts, transformed into functional café décor, seating, counters, and installations. The café served exclusive Indo-Japanese fusion dishes, long before food mashups and experimental gastronomy became mainstream in India (this was 2016).
 

To deepen interaction, we created a community art wall where visitors painted, doodled, and shared their experiences. This wall then travelled to the next city on the festival tour, where new audiences added to the artwork — creating a living, evolving piece of collective expression.
 

Across two days, the activation drew over 100,000 visitors, with an average dwell time of 6–8 minutes inside the café and installations — significantly higher than typical festival booth engagement. Post-event surveys showed a 4.4% lift in brand recall among the youth segment, which were strong results for a category-disruptive presence at a food-only festival.
 

The Auto-Café became one of the most talked-about experiences at the event, helping Maruti Suzuki build relevance in a space where automobile brands rarely participate.

Below, you’ll find a video that showcases the café, the experience, the reactions, and the on-ground engagement it created.