In March 2021, Craft Coffee opened its first kiosk in Kolkata. Abhinav Kumar and Dipraj Das established the company with the goal of “plan a millennial-centric scalable format on handcrafted coffee and food pairing.” In Kolkata’s Ballygunge neighborhood, they opened a Craft Coffee Experience Centre.
Both the founder and co-founder left their jobs and invested INR 20 lakh in getting things started. Vijay Choudhury, an angel investor, provided additional funding of INR 60 lakh.
“At Craft coffee our pursuit is to continuously innovate towards making a cup of high-quality coffee while also engaging customers in the story of the coffee and hence the concept of the hub and spoke model where we open one or two experience centres in a city based on its potential and have self-service speciality coffee kiosks around them. We continuously strive to bring out the different flavour nodes suited to the palette of millennials—hence products like Coffucha or Coffee Kombucha, Cascara refresher or cranberry lime coffee tonic,” Kumar said about his brand’s ethos.
They spent a lot of time experimenting with coffee and food pairings, matching desserts and savory dishes to the types of coffee offered to customers. He said their baristas were taught as tour guides to engage customers in conversation and share the coffee trip.
“We source our beans from the Nandipura estate situated at an altitude of 2200 feet in the Mudigere area of Karnataka. The region grows some high quality grades of Chandragiri Arabica. The concept is built on the platform of promoting take away / hyper local delivery and home delivery model thereby making specialty coffee easily and affordably available,” he added.
Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Bengaluru, Jaipur, and Delhi were among the cities the company planned to reach in phase-1 of its expansion. According to him, each city would have one or two experience centers with a combined area of 5000-7000 square feet and 20-35 kiosks, depending on the coverage radius. Quality coffee, reasonable costs, and simple accessibility were all priorities.
By creating a coffee box subscription service, the company hoped to develop a parallel online and institutional sales presence. Their products would be customized and selected according to consumer preferences.
“The future of the brand lies in integrating modern technology as a service facilitator thereby ensuring scalability and increased penetration through app based ordering and own delivery platform, loyalty program and self-service kiosks as well as mobile order takers. Hence a lot of planned investment will go into product and technology upgradation,” Kumar said.
