Famous for Bollywood, its rich culture and a fond love of Cricket (and being extremely good at it) India isn’t often associated with coffee, but the landscape is changing and India has started to wake up to coffee.
It might come as a bit of a surprise that India’s love of coffee is a fairly new thing, considering that they’ve been one of the world’s biggest coffee producers for many years. Indian coffee is grown at high altitiude and often exposed to damp & humid conditions as part of processing in order to replicate conditions that gave coffee from India its distinctive taste. Coffee has always had a presence in Southern India, but it’s always been Tea and Chai that have been the preferred options, until recently.
The Influence of Youth
Urban youth are having a great impact on India’s coffee culture
The ‘coffee revolution’ that has swept across India has been largely associated with and driven by young people selecting coffee shops as their chosen destination to meet up. Research has found that 40% of young people drink coffee purely for pleasure, further indicating that the trend is driven more by social status rather than a love or ‘need’ for the drink itself. All the signs point to an accelerating coffee culture too. By far the biggest coffee chain in India is domestic brand Cafe Coffee Day, which back in 2012 were opening a store a day and want to add another 150 stores by 2016, which will give more young people a place to meet but also opening up opportunity for more people across a wider audience to buy their coffee more easily.
Western Culture
Young people meeting up and drinking coffee as social practice is very similar to the Western culture that has been developed by the big chain brands such as Starbucks and Costa, and it wasn’t too long before the international chains sat up, took notice and started to elbow their way into the Indian market. Costa made its way to India before Starbucks and saw great success.
Costa is the third largest coffee chain in India
In December 2014 Costa had 82 outlets in India but have plans in place to open another 200 across 2015 and 2016. This success was something that Starbucks wanted to get involved with and in 2012 Starbucks opened their first chain in India. This interest from the big brands such as Starbucks, Costa, McCafe and others shows just how far the coffee culture in India has come and how it is still growing, and will grow further as the likes of Costa and Starbucks continue to invest in the Indian market.
Tea vs Coffee
It wasn’t too long ago that Coffee or Tea wasn’t even a debate in India. The Indians were some of the biggest tea consumers in the world and coffee didn’t get a look. Tea is still heavily consumed in India, but coffee is now not only an option, but many people’s first choice and coffee consumption in India has risen by 5% per year, whereas the increase of tea consumption is only at 2% per year.
Coffee or tea?
In 2013 India’s tea industry was pressing the government to declare tea as the national drink of India, but the government refused as not to discourage coffee and other beverage businesses from entering India. Although considered by many to be already be India’s national drink, the tea industry remains keen for tea to be announced as the official nation drink of India by the government. Tea is largely still the most consumed drink in India, with consumption and production being three times more than that of coffee, but with the popularity of coffee continuing to grow, the coffee culture in India continuously developing, and more investment into coffee chains by the big names being promised, it might not be too long before India is becomes a nation of coffee drinkers.
