With the advent of Specialty Coffee cafes and D2C brands the choice available to millennials for their coffee brew has multiplied. With millennials demanding “Cold Brew Coffee”, “Nitro Brew”, Syphons, Pour Over and other such coffee brews, the café chains are having to constantly innovate and upgrade their menu.
Kindly brief us about Kaapi Machines and what are the products and services offered by you?
Kaapi Machines was founded in 2007, at a time when the café concept was just growing in India. The idea was to provide coffee businesses with the right equipment, training, and support to grow and thrive. The company has since grown, serves now many top café chains, hotels and corporates and is considered a market leader in the coffee equipment industry. With a strong regional infrastructure and local support for training and after sales service, Kaapi Machines has an edge amongst competitors.
Tell us about the Innovations in the coffee industry and how has technology played an important role behind the growth of this sector?
With the advent of Specialty Coffee cafes and D2C brands the choice available to millennials for their coffee brew has multiplied. With millennials demanding “Cold Brew Coffee”, “Nitro Brew”, Syphons, Pour Over and other such coffee brews, the café chains are having to constantly innovate and upgrade their menu.
We support the café businesses by launching products that provide multiple advantages – newer brewing techniques, great design, efficiency of operations and automation.
Some popular new-age products include:
- The ModBar: An undercounter Espresso Machine, first installed at Araku Café, Bangalore
- The Brood Nitro: A new age Nitro Coffee Brewer, present at a select few cafes
- The Tone Touch: An innovation which automates the flow rate and water temperature to replicate the manual brews made by hand by Baristas
- The Toddy Cold Brew system: Used by most top café chains in India
- Kaapi iOT, our own platform which allows contactless transactions through vending machines installed in offices, hotels and restaurants.
We are very excited about the future of technology in coffee and are here to bring the best from the world to the Indian market.
Tell us about your market competition and what are your unique value propositions?
With the emergence of a more discerning consumer, the primary challenge for this segment are: one – how to maintain consistency of product as cafes scale, and two – how to differentiate and keep the customers interest alive!
Kaapi Machines functions as a full-stack coffee consultancy, equipment and after sales company in a market dominated by pure-play trading entities. This gives the company an edge amongst competitors, none of whom have created a strong infrastructure with regional and local support for training and after sales service. Newer innovations like our Kaapi iOT platform for vending machines and online ecommerce and CRM tools are also clearly ahead of the industry. Kaapi also conducts many coffee events including Barista contests, coffee community meet-ups and online masterclasses. This all-encompassing approach helps Kaapi Machines maintain its leadership position in the industry.
Tell us something about ‘Confluence of technology’ in the coffee industry with examples and how it is benefiting the coffee industry?
Kaapi Machines has always been about innovation and technology and we have been working towards a very exciting product line-up. While we would be showcasing these products through the year at food shows, here is a sneak peek:
- A Boiler-less Coffee Machine (never seen before)
- Café automation products – to standardize and automate all processes including tamping, milk dispensing and even milk foaming
- Our mainstay brand Rancilio’s new range – with patented Steady Brew technology
- The new cutting edge Grind-By-Weight Grinders by Mahlkonig, the world’s iconic Grinder brand
- New products from the stable of WMF Germany for small and medium hotels
Brief us about your recent innovations, investments and expansion plans.
- The most exciting, innovative (and under-studied) markets for coffee in India are non-metro cities like Surat, Nagpur, Jabalpur, Ahmedabad and Ludhiana. We are seeing emergence of very interesting coffee and café brands from these markets.
- The last 2 years, Kaapi Machines has been part of the birth of close to 20 new coffee brands, with a lot of new coffee roasters setting up shop. This was an area dominated by a few Italian and large Indian brands – but the market has truly opened up, with a lot of new Roasteries, who are innovating and growing the market. Some exciting ones include – Subko Coffee, Araku Coffee, Grey Soul, Bloom Coffee Roasters, Bean Rove, BerryCo, Nandan Coffee, Highbrooks and so many more!!
- While 2021 was all about the growth in the café segment, the year 2022, we believe – will see much more of expansion in the RTD Coffee Market along with a return to offices and hence a strong coffee vending market. The consumers are not the same however, and hence an upgrade in the coffee experience inside offices is also round the corner!
We are on a strong growth trajectory, and we expect the coming year to deliver a record growth for us. With the number of new projects, products and expansion plans from customers, it will be a year to look forward to.The entire team is excited and raring to go!
