28.9.08

Barista brews Bangla cup


Barista Coffee Company Ltd (BCCL) is all set to take its Barista Espresso Bar chain to Bangladesh. The Indian café chain that was acquired by Italian coffee major Lavazza in 2007 has already entered into a franchise agreement with a company in Bangladesh and expects to roll out the first store in 30-45 days.Tarak Bhattacharya, head of operations, Barista Coffee said that the company has appointed MGH Group as its master franchisee for Bangladesh. “We are currently fine-tuning the pricing of our products for the Bangladesh market. Once that is done, the menu will be ready for printing and the first espresso bar should get operational in just over a month from now.”BCCL is targeting setting up of around six espresso bars in Bangladesh over the next 18 months. Vishal Kapoor, head of marketing and product development, Barista Coffee said the company was currently looking only at the espresso bar format in Bangladesh. “At a later stage, we might explore the possibilities of extending the Barista Crème format,” he said. Barista’s espresso bars will be set up in key locations. In fact, Dhaka will have at least two espressos at the very beginning.Barista Crème is a large-format store spread across 2,000 sq ft and is positioned as a high-end coffee lounge. Barista Espresso Bars are small-formats and have an area of around 900 sq ft. The cost of setting up an outlet is in the range of Rs 30-50 lakh, depending on the size. The cost is usually higher for Barisa Crème as its products are mostly exclusive. In India, Barista Coffee is planning to add 84 outlets in the next six months. It is also seeking a footprint in 10 cities other than the ones it already has a presence in. These outlets will be set up in southern, northern, western and eastern region of the country in the order of priority. The entire funding will be through internal accruals.BCCL currently has 220 stores across 32 cities, including 15 Barista Creme outlets. By 2008-end, the company plans to have 300 cafes across 42 cities.“Most of the store openings will be in the south, north and west and only a small percentage will be in the eastern region. Of the 84 new outlets, six will be Barista Crème and the rest will be Barista Espresso Bar,” Bhattacharya said.In fact, Barista will also enter the airport retailing space in Mumbai with at least six outlets. “Of these six outlets, one will be a Barista Crème,” Kapoor said.The coffee café chain recently revisited its pricing strategy across all outlets. “There has been an increase in the input cost and hence we made a slight increase in the product pricing in our menu,” said Bhattacharya. The increase is to the tune of 8% across all our outlets, Bhattacharya said.Interestingly, Barista’s key competitor Café Coffee Day Ltd (CCDL) also raised the prices of its products by 8% a couple of months ago. As a result, both the coffee café chains now have similar menu pricing, which was not the case earlier as Barista was perceived to be more expensive than CCDL, giving the latter a competitive edge.

1 comment:

swag said...

Dang. I took that photo.