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Indian speciality coffee brand Blue Tokai will be expanding its presence to 130 outlets by the end of the financial year. The company is focused on growing in the domestic market it operates.
“We are not looking to expand to new markets and our focus is going deeper into the markets where we are already present. We should be able to open up five stores within a market in a small amount of time for it to make operational sense. At this point, we see more opportunity in the larger cities rather than focussing on the smaller cities,” said Matt Chitharanjan, Co-Founder and CEO, of Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters to businessline.
Gurgaon-headquartered Blue Tokai, which commenced its operations in 2013 is present in over 80 outlets in major metro cities in India. The company recently received funding from actor Deepika Padukone. The funding was done through Ka Enterprises and was a part of the company’s Series B funding round.
To make speciality coffee available on the go, the company has introduced its brewing products including easy pours and cold brew cans. It will introduce more ready-to-brew products.
“The company plans to open nearly 60 more outlets over the next five years after crossing 130 outlets and the focus will be more on the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) products. The brand will have reached scale and mass where we see an opportunity to move more into offline retail with our products,” he said.
International markets
Blue Tokai has operations in Japan and will explore expanding its international presence in the Middle East market.
“Japan is one of the largest coffee-drinking markets in the world. Indian coffee is unknown in the place. However, the response in Japan is far beyond our expectations. We had just a pop-up store in a mall in Tokyo serving only coffee. The customer feedback we got was that people did not expect the flavour complexity of Indian coffee. We will expand in Japan. The next market we would look at will be the Middle East but not in the immediate future,” added Matt Chitharanjan
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