Chai Point to foray into loose leaf tea market next month

An omni-channel tea servicing brand Chai Point, owned by Mountain Trail Foods Pvt Ltd, is all set to launch its own brand in loose leaf tea in July.

“Our vision is to own the ritual of chai. We want to deliver our customers the perfect chai with high quality and consistency,” said Chai Point Founder and CEO Amuleek Singh Bijral.

Apart from its retail presence — 100 stores across eight cities, delivery service Chai-on-call and a vending kiosk-based solution called boxC.in, being used by 150 corporate clients in their offices — now Chai Point is participating in making its own chai at home.

“We will be keeping loose leaf tea packs at our stores,” Bijral said. For Chai Point, growth has been pretty good, and it is witnessing slightly lesser than 100% growth. “In the last fiscal, we sold 30 million cups of tea, and in this fiscal, our target is to sell 60 million cups,” he said.

BoxC.in is an IoT-enabled automatic filter coffee and tea dispenser. “We target white-collar workers in India who live on chai,” said the CEO, adding that the company also plans to increase its retail presence by opening at least 40 more stores by the end of this fiscal.

When asked about competitors, he said, “Our focus is not on how we take care of competitors, but to go after customers and take care of them.”

Chai Point invests heavily in technology. Its Cloud-based Shark is used at the store level, enabling POS to be directly connected to the warehouse for managing stock availability at the stores.

The size of the Indian tea market is approximately Rs 10,000 crore. “Close to 70% of the non-alcoholic beverage market is chai, and for every cup of coffee consumed, there are 10 cups of tea consumed,” he said. “Chai Point is operationally profitable, and our technology investment is always ahead of the curve. Apart from Bengaluru, we are seeing good growth in the NCR region and Pune as well,” he added.