Chennai :

The traditional south Indian filter coffee , it appears, has gone instant. And the elderly Chennai mami too tired to decoct for one, the working couple who love their filter coffee but are to busy to brew and the family from north India unable to crack the bean blend that will produce the perfect cuppa, are gulping it down.

In the last one and a half years, Chennai has seen a number of entrants into the readymade decoction market — a plantation owner, a mom of two, and a former milk delivery boy. And there’s another from Udumalpet waiting in the wings.

All you need to do is add hot milk, sugar to taste and you’re ready to go, says Geetha Saravanan, a mother of two, who launched her brand Bean Boy, last year. Made at a central kitchen in Perungudi, the decoction — her grandmother’s recipe — is bottled and delivered to customers’ homes at 5 am. “My family and friends  love my filter coffee. They always tell me they never get it right. So I thought, why not market it,” says Saravanan, who began with 1.5 lakh borrowed from her husband.

Delivering an average of 400 bottles a day, Bean Boy  generates revenue of Rs 1.5 lakh a month for Saravanan, who even gives her customers a value-add — a workshop on how to make filter coffee.

Then there is the coffee plantation hand-turned-milk delivery boy-turned-entrepreneur V Balaji, 26, who began delivering his Sri Balaji Coffee  decoction in 2010. “The idea for my business came to me when I delivered milk to a north Indian family, who invited me in for coffee. They offered me a cup of instant coffee , and I told them I would make something better,” says Balaji, who returned to their house the next day with his home-brewed decoction. Soon, he began getting orders by word of mouth, which he turned into a business that is now earning him 5,000 a day.

Homemaker Priya Srinivasan, one of Balaji’s loyal customers, says the true test of his decoction is that her mother-in-law likes it. “She used to prefer tea because there was no filter coffee in the house. Making it the regular way takes long. With this instant decoction, I can see she is happy,” says Srinivasan .

‘Coffee market growing at 6% per year in India’

For coffee plantation owner Anush Narayanan, who has been selling his own brand of coffee powder since the 1990s, creating a readymade decoction seemed a logical extension of his business. “The filter coffee market is growing and so is the market for readymade decoction. We sell 12,000 pouches a month,” says Narayanan, who retails his Kaaveri decoction out of 75 stores in Chennai and is planning to go nation-wide this year.

As per sources in the  Coffee Board of India , over 30,000 metric  tonnes of coffee are consumed per annum in Tamil Nadu — with filter coffee staking its claim to 54% of the market and 46% going to instant coffee. Pan India, where over one lakh metric tonnes of coffee are consumed per annum, instant coffee has a larger market share  of 57%. The pan-Indian coffee market is growing at the rate of 5% to 6% per annum.Narayanan says he plans to cash in on the growing Indian market. “We are taking our kaapi decoction toBangalore,Mumbai and Kolkata,”he says.

Meanwhile, G Samyraj from Udumalaipettai, has just trademarked his brand ‘Only Coffee Kumbakonam Degree Filter Coffee’, which has outlets on the national and state highways in TN. He plans to supply his decoction at departmental stores across the state.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / Home> City> Chennai / by Kamini Mathai, TNN / January 25th, 2013