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Home-grown coffee brand Levista aims to capture five per cent share in the Indian instant coffee market - currently dominated by global FMCG brands such as Hindustan Unilever's Bru and Nestle's Sunrise - over the next 15 months.
The domestic instant coffee market is pegged at ₹2,200 crore now. “Levista has managed to achieve 3 per cent market share in the last 3 years since its inception. We aim to garner 5 per cent share in the instant coffee market by April 2022,” S Shriram, Vice President, Levista Coffee said.
He was addressing a virtual press conference to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the coffee brand and unveil a new product and share its near-term growth strategy.
“Over 80 per cent of coffee in India is sold in five southern states and the Union Territory of Puducherry,” he said.
Despite being a pandemic year, Levista has managed to increase its point of sale (POS) presence by over 30 per cent in 2020, penetrated deeper into Tamil Nadu and Karnataka markets besides reaching out to Tier 4 and 5 towns with relevant product SKUs.
Levista’s POS presence went up from 26,000 to over 42,000 between February and December 2020. The company aims to onboard 1,500 more distributors to reach a tally of 100,000 points of sale by the end of FY 2022.
“This would largely come from strong Southern markets of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry," Shriram said, adding, “I don't think we have penetrated more than 2-3 per cent in these markets itself which means there is so much of headroom for us to grow in these two states.”
Expanding to Hindi speaking belts
He also added that Levista would expand to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana from Q1FY21-22 and further expand to tea-consuming, unpenetrated Hindi speaking belts (HSBs) such as Delhi NCR, the Greater Mumbai region and tourist places such as Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, which are incidentally strong coffee consuming markets. These new markets are expected to bring in the incremental revenue from next year.
Launched in December 2017, Levista Coffee, which is a part of the 60-year-old South Indian coffee exporter SLN Coffee Company, also unveiled 'Flavored Coffee' in four variants including Vanilla, Caramel, Hazelnut and Choco-Orange besides launching a new and fifth variant of Instant Coffee 'Supreme' which has 70 per cent Coffee content and 30 per cent Chicory.
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