BENGALURU, INDIA – Tata Global Beverages, the worlds second largest tea company, today announced the pilot launch of its first tea café “Tata Cha”. With this launch, the company said it was evaluating the out of home beverage space in the country.
“It is our first entry into retail space; this is the pilot project we are starting with. We are planning to open four stores in the pilot phase in Bangalore. We will then consolidate, understand how the pilot goes, before we think about what the next step should be,” Tata Global Beverages Regional President Sushant Dash told reporters here.
The whole idea behind entering into Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) and tea café space was two fold, he said.
The first was this was a growth segment as eating out had been growing at an exponential rate; second — 70 per cent of consumption in the country in terms of one drinks as beverage even out of home was tea.
“The idea behind was to match the two of them given that people are going out, people drink tea, and Tata Global Beverages is best positioned to bring tea to customers, so we thought of getting into retail space and talking of tea café,” he added.
tata Cha is designed to reflect the heritage of Tata Global Beverages while embracing local culture. The core objective was to create a space that was warm and nurture a “renewed love” for tea, company officials said.
Tata Cha will have three formats of stores- large — which will be about 1300-1400 sq ft, abbreviated — around 700 sq ft, and kiosk which will be mostly at malls, IT parks, institutions and offices. Over the next three months the company intends to operationalise all the four stores in Bengaluru.
Responding to a question about launching in Bengaluru, Dash said it “is one among the most cosmopolitan cities of the country and it might surprise many that there are more cups of tea that are had in country, than Coffee… our internal number show that 37,000 cups of tea as compared to 17,000 cups of coffee. It is significant difference in terms of tea and coffee.”
On the testing period before going ahead, he said as of now, the company was looking at for next six to eight months.
“I think we will need to give ourselves that much time before we evaluate and stabilise.”
Tata Cha will also be providing delivery services and has its own app. It had also tied up various delivery services, officials said.
