Swish tea cafes chasing riches reinvent poor man’s chai in India

HYDERABAD — That sweet and milky tea concoction called chai is getting an image makeover in India. Driving the change is the other beverage — coffee.

Rising incomes and demand for a refined experience transcending chai are spawning posh tea lounges in the nation’s biggest cities, a transformation mirroring 15 years of coffee revolution that brought Starbucks in 2012. Entrepreneurs are pooling their savings to set up these tea houses, inspired by the US$175 million (S$247.0 million) initial public offering planned by the parent of Cafe Coffee Day, a chain backed by KKR & Co.

Tea is a bigger opportunity than coffee because consumption of the leaf-based beverage beats its rival 30 cups to one, says Mr Nitin Saluja, who runs 12 tea outlets under the name Chaayos in and around New Delhi. Euromonitor International data show per capita spending on tea in the second-most populous country was US$1.70 a year in 2014, versus US$18 in the UK, showing potential for up-selling a premium version of the drink.

“If at all any company becomes the Starbucks of India one day, it will be a chai company,” said Mr Saluja, 32, who started his chain in 2012 after quitting a management consultancy job in the US. “The reason why Starbucks became so huge in the US is that they started serving a beverage that was already popular in America, but in a better way. We are trying to sell something that is inherent in India’s culture. That is the opportunity we are tapping into.”

The ventures are seeking to strip chai of its street credentials and elevate it to a higher price point, while introducing middle-class Indians to finer leaves from around the world.

What it means is a relatively well-off Indian now has more and better tea options in a relaxed environment: A cup of Japanese Sencha or Mumbai’s favourite “cutting chai”, which is otherwise had during a rushed break from work amid the hustle and bustle of crowded sidewalks.

Even though India is the world’s biggest consumer of tea after China because of sheer population, the annual per capita consumption is among the lowest. The state-run Tea Board of India’s figure is about 800g compared with 2kg in the UK and 1kg in neighbouring Sri Lanka.

“People’s awareness has increased and tea intake has been steadily growing in India,” said Ms Ruchi Sally, founder and director of Elargir Solutions, a retail consultant based in Singapore and Mumbai. “Simply opening a place for people to hang out won’t work, because you already have Starbucks and other coffee shops. You need to have a good value proposition.”

Mr Saluja hit upon the idea of setting up Chaayos about three years ago when his craving for a decent cup of Indian chai after breakfast in Houston went unsatisfied. He quit his job and started off with his total savings of 2 million rupees (S$43,414), he says.

Now, he has plans for 50 stores by May next year, including in Mumbai and Bengaluru. In May, New York-based Tiger Global Management, which has emerged as the biggest backer of e-commerce startups in India, led a US$5 million investment in his company.

EARTHEN POTS

Tea Trails is another chain that started off in December 2013 with 8 operational stores, two of them franchises. Mr Uday Mathur, a co-founder and director of Zone8 Tea World, the company that runs Tea Trails, says he has plans to scale that up to 500 stores in about four years.

“We will still be only scratching the surface at that point of time,” said Mr Mathur, 57, who founded and ran a chain of pre-schools before selling his stake to private equity funds.

His stores offer about 80 varieties of tea, including the Indian chai in earthen pots for about 70 rupees, more than seven times the price of its street avatar.

NO FORMULA

The best locations to have outlets are colleges and offices where young people with decent purchasing power hang out, according to Mr Mathur. His product cost is less than 20 per cent of the selling price and he expects to break even at Ebitda level in the financial year through March 2017, he said.

There’s no clear formula for success in the food and beverage business. Mr Chirag Yadav, 32, who started Chaipatty in Bengaluru in 2009, expanded in the city with two franchised outlets but had to shut them down soon because of differences with partners. He still has dreams to expand.

Meanwhile, tea producers like Manjushree Plantations have attempted to move up the value chain by selling high-end leaves at airports in their own boutiques, which are similar to those run by Singapore-based TWG Tea in South-east Asia and the US. The Indian grower also has tea houses in Mumbai and New Delhi.

The biggest challenge for these businesses will be in picking prominent locations that draw in customers while keeping rental costs under control. Retail chains in India spend about 9 per cent of their revenue on real estate, compared to an average 3-4 per cent for global retailers, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report last month.

Average tea prices at weekly auctions held across India have risen 8.6 per cent this year to 128.07 rupees per kg, according to the Tea Board.

COFFEE DAY

The mushrooming of coffee houses across the country in the past 15 years has familiarised Indians with the global experience of enjoying a non-alcoholic beverage. Coffee consumption in India has jumped 50 per cent since 2000 to 1.2 million bags of 60kg each, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture.

Cafe Coffee Day, owned by Bengaluru-based Coffee Day Enterprises, runs about 1,650 outlets across India, more than three times all its rivals combined, according to a report by consultants Technopak Advisors. Rivals include Barista Coffee, which was formerly owned by Luigi Lavazza SpA, and UK-based Costa Coffee, besides Starbucks.

NO PRIVATE EQUITY

The share sale by Coffee Day next week will help the chain cut its debt, Chairman VG Siddhartha said in an interview yesterday. The company plans to open 135 outlets and install 5,000 vending machines in commercial and corporate venues each year for the foreseeable future, he said.

Tea Trails’ Mathur says the Coffee Day IPO is good for the entire industry. It makes investors “more receptive to models like ours”, he said.

For him, the focus now is on building the brand and wait for valuations later. He is open to selling a stake at a later stage, but he says he’d shun private equity, a sentiment echoed by Mr Yadav, because that would mean loss of independence.

“I don’t want to bring them in at this stage,” he said. “We don’t want to have PE guys breathing down our neck.” BLOOMBERG