How Coffee Day grew to become a massive bean-to-cup conglomerate

Cafe Coffee Day has come into searing focus because of the disappearance of its founder VG Siddhartha. What started as a coffee plantation and then a single coffee shop on Bengaluru's Brigade Road is now one of India most recognised and ubiquitous brands.

What we know as Cafe Coffee Day, or CCD, today began as the Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company Limited in 1993. The core business of the company was growing, processing and selling coffee beans and power.

The company started a coffee house on Bangalore's iconic Brigade Road in 1996. Bangalore at the time was emerging as the cutting edge of India's new prowess in IT and ITES. Its atmosphere was one of distinct forward movement, and the internet was still something that wasn't yet in everyone's homes.

The coffee shop on Brigade Road offered coffee and internet browsing for Rs 100 per hour. This was an era when internet browsing centres charged anywhere between Rs 40 and Rs 120 per hour depending on the speed of their connections, and the coffee shop offered premium coffee as well.

The idea stuck. By the turn of the millennium, Cafe Coffee Day was in multiple cities and expanding, even if it had dropped the internet browsing to become a chain of pure coffee shops.

Combined with India's increasingly glowing growth story and a young population not quite bridled by the conservatism of the preceding generations, CCD's cappuccinos, frappes and coffee slushes were well and truly on their way to becoming a part and parcel of India's cityscapes. By April 2019, CCD had close to 1,752 active cafe outlets and 57,000 vending machines across India.

In a filing with SEBI, Coffee Day declared that its coffee businesses alone had revenue of Rs 5,732 crore for 2018-19, with EBITDA at Rs 1,290 crore and net profit at Rs 169 crore. Those numbers do not include its earnings and profits from its 35 other subsidiaries that include tech parks, resorts, financial services, mining and shipping businesses.

The company also diversified into making, selling and maintaining a coffee machine services that became a common sight in the pantries of workspaces across the country. It also started a chain of stores selling coffee powder, typically used for filter coffee or French press coffees. By the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, Coffee Day was a complete coffee company. It owned plantations, was the largest grower of the Arabica strain of coffee in Asia, was one of the largest exporters of coffee beans on the continent, was a massive player in the manufacture and sale of other coffee products, and was the largest chain of coffee shops in India. Along the way, it also changed its name from Amalgamated Coffee Bean Trading Company to Coffee Day.

In 2006, a Coffee Day subsidiary launched a Global Village, an SEZ tech park in Bangalore and entered the hospitality sector with the launch of a chain of premium resorts called 'The Serai'.

With a strong asset portfolio, business diversification, established brand, vertical integration and a functional business, Coffee Day's story is far from over.