When our book Secret Sauce – Inspiring Stories of Great Indian Restaurants was published not a few people pointed out that Café Coffee Day hadn’t featured in the collection. The omission wasn’t because of oversight on our part. We had approached the chain’s senior management, leveraged all the contacts we could to hear the story from V G Siddhartha, the founder of Café Coffee Day who died this week. We were told repeatedly that he was deliberately low-profile and media-shy. Which is why we could make no progress even when a publisher wanted the Café Coffee Day story as a separate book. Now, it can never be told in the same way.
I do not have the knowledge or the expertise to comment on the finances of CCD, which is allegedly the reason why Siddhartha took his life. So, this is a tribute to and reminiscences of an Indian F&B enterprise, the likes of which had never been seen before and the future of which is uncertain now.
Even as we discussed the idea of a book on Café Coffee Day, we came up with what we thought might be a captivating lead-in; we would speak to Indians visiting Vienna, who had felt the thrill of seeing CCD there. Imagine the audacious vision of setting up an Indian café in a city famed for its traditional coffee houses. The forays abroad were high points on a remarkable growth graph, but it’s the sheer scale of the business in India that dazzles and awes. There are now 1800-plus cafes across the country – in the metros, in tier 2 and 3 towns, on highways – employing nearly 20,000 people.
Every one of these cafes does what it says on the box. You may or may not be a fan of the coffee – I was a fan of the Irish coffee and the Tropical Iceberg in the early days – but you have to love the idea of a quiet haven in the most bustling quarters of a city. It’s a place for dates, meetings, reading, surfing, whiling away time, waiting, without being hustled or hurried.
In our cities, especially Bangalore, there are few people who do not have a CCD memory. To establish an Indian brand on a scale that far surpasses any of the international ones in the space is a spectacular achievement. To make that brand human and relatable and make customers think of it with fondness and nostalgia is another. Café Coffee Day became a brand urban India considered its own, various elements coming together to make that happen – from the format of the stores, the well-trained staff, the cool logo that stood for conversations and the tagline ‘A lot can happen over coffee’.
Much of it stemmed from one man’s dream. Those who worked closely with VG Siddhartha vouch for that. We hope that dream will be kept alive and nurtured even after his tragic passing.
