The Hindu Business Line : `Think coffee' pilot project launched

COFFEE, tea or me? Nah!. Ask Ms Lakshmi Venkatachalam, Chairperson, Coffee Board what is it that drives her and her answer is a passionate "coffee, coffee and more coffee''.

And this is precisely why the lady, who has been at the helm of the country's coffee trade for two years now, is brewing up a potent concoction of business and glamour around Indian coffee which will, she says, have a country of tea drinkers thirsting for a hot cuppa of `kaapi' in the years to come.

Ms Venkatachalam's gameplan is simple. Over the next couple of years, she plans to literally unleash a deluge of coffee gyan in the market, harping on its positive effects and hard selling it as the best thing to happen to us tea-drinking Indians.

The first step towards this has already been taken with the Coffee Board launching `Think Coffee', a multi-crore coffee promotion campaign from Pune city on Saturday.

The pilot project, for which the board has roped in a professional public relations agency, will work towards creating awareness in the market about the variety of coffee available in the country, present it as a developing business opportunity for wannabe entrepreneurs and position it as the hippest drink to be seen with for youngsters and the old alike. Move over champagne, wine. In addition, she plans to rope in private sector coffee retailers like Café Coffee Day to partner her in what she terms the "storming of corporates and campuses'' to ensure that they substitute their tea and soft drink vending machines for coffee.

"The idea is to increase consumption which is abysmal in the domestic market,'' says Ms Venkatachalam who points out that while production of coffee has been growing at the rate of 3.7 per cent , consumption is trailing behind at 1.5 per cent.

And while India currently exports eighty per cent of the around three lakh tonnes produced annually, the value of the exports has taken a beating in a "world awash with coffee".

"This brings us back to the home truth that the first thing to be tackled is to wake up people to the goodness of coffee,'' she says. Ms Venkatachalam is categorical that the private sector coffee industry has the onus of ensuring that the country, which seems to be suddenly spending its hard-earned swigging coffee in up-market coffee bars like Barista and Café Coffee Day, gets a variety to choose from.

"They have to ride this wave which has suddenly made drinking coffee glamorous so that the out of home consumption translates into these consumers going to retails stores, picking up their favourite brand and taking it back home for everyday use,'' she says.

While Indian coffee lovers have very little to choose from on store shelves and often go home thinking Nescafe is the best coffee to drink, the Coffee Board is confident that its effort in promoting regional coffee brands and varieties will go a long way in educating the consumer, along with other steps like instituting the `Flavour of India Fine Cup Award', which had over 350 aspirants from across the coffee growing regions competing for the prestigious recognition.

Ms Venkatachalam has other plans up her sleeve as well. Next month, she heads out to Shillong where the board will hold its first North Eastern Coffee Conference and Festival to promote the product in a belt to which coffee growing and consumption is alien. The board is also open to funding coffee entrepreneurs with viable business plans and has commissioned a manual on coffee ratailing which can serve as a blue-print for aspiring entrepreneurs.

By the end of the current financial year the board also plans to take the `Think Coffee' campaign to at least two other non-traditional coffee markets, says Ms Venkatachalam.

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