Leo Coffee gives global majors a stiff fight

As we enter the conference room on the first floor of the 150-year-old building, Venu Srinivasan, the young scion of Leo Coffee, is busy on the computer , he looks up with a satisfied grin.

“Please come. I just had to cross check some details about our consignment to California,” he says.

Leo Coffee, a nearly half-century-old filter coffee brand based in Chennai, still gives a stiff fight to the instant coffee and other filter-coffee brands from big domestic and international companies.

“Not just in the domestic market, we also export to countries such as the US, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and West Asian countries.”

Leo exports at least a tonne of roasted coffee beans and powder every month to the US alone. “Genuine coffee drinkers prefer filter coffee to instant ones and now “drinking filter coffee is fashionable,” says Srinivasan.

While refusing to give out details of the size of the business, he says Leo at present has 40 company-owned outlets and 200 shop-in-shop counters in supermarkets and department stores across the city.

It has also established the brand’s presence in e-commerce portals, including Amazon, Snapdeal, eBay and Shopclues.

“We are aggressive on e-commerce. We take technology very seriously. Right now, the volume we sell through these portals may be negligible, but it’s very promising.”

He says all these home-grown and international café chains are not a threat to traditional coffee brands such as Leo.

“They in fact complement. All these chains are focusing only on the out-of-home segment, but our aim is to be in every kitchen.” Leo also sells coffee filters.

Thanks to innovation, coffee brewing is not a 20-minute affair any more. Just three minutes, the decoction is ready in the ‘coffee percolator’.

Besides, Leo has also entered into the café space under the brand Mylapore Mocha.

“We want to mark our presence in that space too.” As of now, it has half-a-dozen outlets. These outlets are not very elaborate like other Café chains. “We wanted them to be small joints where people can just enjoy a cuppa,” he says.

Besides filter coffee, Mylapore Mocha also serves various other beverages such as tea, iced tea, hot chocolate and badam milk. With Mocha, Leo targets all malls and even high streets.

Ask him how much coffee Leo sells every year. He says with a smile, “All I can tell you is at least a million cups of Leo coffee are being consumed every day.”

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