COFFEE-BIKE PEDALS INTO INDIA

Coffee is enjoying a boom among middle-income spenders in India and one of the players tapping the opportunity is Germany-based Coffee-Bike. “India is always considered as a tea drinking country, so we have developed a coffee concept. We were wondering a bit in the beginning if the Indian market was ready for a coffee concept like ours, but we have learnt in the past few years since we started in India that coffee is taking off in a big way,” says Jonathan Dobrawa, Senior International Franchise Manager, Coffee-Bike.

In 2016, the brand has entered the Indian market with two Coffee-Bikes in Noida and Bangalore. Now, with seven outlets in New Delhi, Bangalore and Cochin, Coffee-Bike has successfully proven its concept in India and is planning to open outlets all across the Indian subcontinent. “We started with Bangalore and South Delhi, primarily because there is a huge group of under-30 people who are very open about these concepts. They are now visiting Starbucks and Cafe Coffee Day and we have a mobile coffee concept which has received a good response,” Dobrawa informs. “These are our future potential customers, and especially the young professionals in Bangalore engaged with the IT sector,” he adds.

BLENDED OFFERING

“We try to find a way between redemption adaption and being staying true to our roots. We are not trying to change everything, or we will lose our core essence that we have, which is our great design, our Germany-engineered Coffee- Bike that everyone loves and the really good coffee quality,” he says.

MASTER FRANCHISE ROUTE

The brand is looking to expand through master franchisees and development franchisees only and currently not able to offer unit franchising. This will change, however, once a good Master franchisee was found. not willing to opt for unit franchisees. “We are looking for really good partners in India who can develop with us,” he says. Talking about cities which are on the expansion radar, Dobrawa says, “The biggest cities, metropolitan cities are mainly interesting to us. We are looking for the very open cities like Bangalore that has changed so much in the past years. Essentially, we are looking at cities that are developing rapidly because those are the places which will have our target groups of coffee lovers,” he says.

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