Cafe Business With Potential

Cafes are not the places where you just visit for a cup of coffee and exit. Many renowned cafés have a culture, a legacy associated with them. These days, in post-modern urban India, café is a place where the youngsters gather to socialise or to do leisurely work, or to do their college or business assignments on their computers. With many of the cafes offering free Wi-Fi, you will find many of the guests occupying lonely nooks to concentrate on their assignments, with a cup of warm, aromatic coffee. Coffee, which was mainly a drink confined to south India, has become, with its various different avatars, a favourite of the youths in the Indian metros as well as in tier-I and tier-II cities. International brands like Café Coffee Day, Starbucks, Costa Coffee, and Barista to name a few, have contributed significantly to this coffee café culture. Ashok Malkani discusses about this happening scenario. The growth of café culture and the future of cafes in the context of India’s food service industry are analysed.

- Ashok Malkani

Once upon a time, coffee in India was considered to be a drink favoured by the South Indians. Filter coffee was, and still is, the preferred drink in the South. Strong, smooth and rich, it boasts of strict quality standards, tradition and sentiment. Filter coffee has been long entrenched in the South Indian psyche. Coffee houses were popular in this part of the country since ages.

Slowly the popularity of coffee began flowing to other parts of India. Especially among the intelligentsia, coffee houses began to assume popularity in metros and other big cities of the country. These days, coffee cafes have assumed a national flavour.

Not just that…Today, specialist coffee house chains like Starbucks, Café Coffee Day, Barista Coffee Company, and Costa Coffee are increasingly becoming haunts not only for leisure but also for work purposes. One of the main reasons for work related meetings at these outlets is because they offer free Wi-Fi. Several youngsters today work from home and you can find them, as well as college students, concentrating on their laptops or i pads to complete either their college or their work assignments, while sipping a hot cuppa of the refreshing brew.

History of Cafes

Coffee houses have an intellectual legacy. India’s coffee houses were places where many a poet , artist, and intellectual were born. They were the places where conversation flowed as freely as the coffee. For decades, a coffee house was the place where people from all walks of life gathered.

They discussed politics, literature, science, society or just idly gossip, over good, freshly-brewed cuppa. Even now walking into any of the legendary coffee houses like United Coffee House (Delhi), Canara Coffee House (Vadodara), Flury’s (Kolkata), Brahmin’s Coffee Bar (Bangalore), can mesmerise one with the aroma of roasted coffee beans.