Anything for a coffee

Blue Foods CEO Sunil Kapur would fly to Singapore for his iced latte. Now, he doesn't need to. He's just added coffee to his empire.

Sitting in the new The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf outlet at New Delhi's Select Citywalk mall, Sunil Kapur, CEO, Blue Foods and the "daddy" of organised food retail in the country (all his friends and competitors seem to call him that though he protests "I am not that old"), nurses his glass of iced latte with more fondness than mere coffee can perhaps inspire.

"You know, before I brought this brand home," he says "I would fly to Singapore just for this coffee. I was so obsessed with it. I would fly down, do some business in the day, but really only because I wanted to have the coffee, and come back in the evening.

My family and friends thought I was crazy." Kapur's Singapore jaunts will now be on hold because the trademark iced blended drinks, pioneered by "The Bean", the gourmet coffee chain famous for its association with Hollywood, are now available in the country thanks to Kapur "" propitiously at the very site that Starbucks had chosen for its India debut before being so rudely rejected by governmental norms.

Kapur can hardly get over that fact. "Can you believe that?" he asks, "We were supposed to come up there," he points to an adjoining space, "but it's really like the right actor bagging the right role in a film."

That may not be an unlikely similie. Apart from the fact that Coffee Bean now aspires to come up in the premises of the Yashraj Films studio in Mumbai (and also at all airports, malls and so forth), Kapur and his family do have a film connection that goes back a long way.

Blue Foods, a company that started five years ago with the intention of getting into all lifestyle (food-related) brands at an initial investment of roughly Rs 15 crore, is the biggest F&B retail player in the country today with an annual turnover of Rs 180 crore.

It has a presence in 15 Indian cities with 15 flagship brands and has a huge expansion plan for the coming few months, involving investment to the tune of another Rs 200 crore. But before we talk more numbers, Kapur will reminiscence about how it all really started "" much smaller.

The Mumbai restaurant Copper Chimney may be familiar to anyone with a fondness for north Indian khana. With huge waiting queues even today, both for lunch and dinner, 365 days a year, this has been a long-time favourite.

The restaurant was started by Kapur's father in the 1970s after he branched off from the business of producing films. (Sagina, starring Dilip Kumar, co-produced by Kapur's father, is the last film that Kapur can remember coming out of the family stable.) "My father really loved to cook.

All the dishes that became famous at Copper Chimney, the chelo kebabs, the paneer masala, were innovated upon by him... Unlike me, who's more of a businessman," says Kapur.

Kapur may be a successful businessman indeed "" his company has alliances with most of the retail majors like Shoppers Stop, DLF, the Future Group and Emmar MGF and, of the many concepts that he's juggling with, he is also into the food courts biz (more on that later) "" but his heart is clearly in the right place.

"I love food and I love to eat out. In fact, if my family wants me to eat at home, they make sure that there is restaurant-like food made at home," he confesses. This essentially translates into the fact that Kapur does his own consumer surveys. "I have a keen sense of what will work in the Indian market," he says.

Giving the coffee example, he says, "Most of the (foreign) companies that you see in the market today approached us first but I liked Coffee Bean because I knew their kind of product and the kind of cost we'd be able to sell them for would work."

The company entered the Indian market through a franchisee arrangement with Blue Foods. On the other hand, almost 98 per cent of Blue Foods outlets, cutting across brands "" from relatively high-end ones like Spaghetti Kitchen to Gelato Italiano, kiosk-models "" are company-run and leased.

Juggling with so many brands could be confusing to say the least but Kapur is happy being a scale player. For all these years, ever since he took over the family business and turned it around many times over, Kapur's mantra for success in the notoriously-fickle F&B biz has been "perceived value for money". "I ensure the best quality," he says, pointing to the smart outlet we are sitting in where everything from the "ingredients to the tables and flooring" is imported.

"Everyone else compromises. It is possible to find local alternatives to everything," he points out. Yet, being a scale player allows him to juggle with prices and keep them down so that the end result is value-for-money.

At Coffee Bean, the prices are at par with other foreign chains, 10-20 per cent higher than at Indian chains and at Spaghetti Kitchen, where I have also eaten, five-staresque ingredients, your truffle oils and the like, are freely used at non-starry prices. I tell him that and he grins, "I wanted to keep the prices down even more but Bill (Marchetti, the celebrity consultant chef in charge) forced me to up them a bit."

This is a mantra, he says, he will stand by even when it comes to the food-courts business that many have dismissed as being a non-revenue earner. At the Great India Place, Noida, however, the 50,000 sq feet food court, the largest in India, and those in Calcutta, Bangalore and elsewhere, care is being taken to be perceived as suitably upmarket. "The cutlery, for instance, that we use is stainless steel, not cheap plastic," Kapur points out. And it is not just about appearances either.