Global coffee shop and beverage chain Starbucks opened its first Reserve store in India in Mumbai. The company claims that the Reserve stores are a part of the company’s chain of premium experiential coffee shops that offer rare coffee blends as part of a separate menu.
According to Sushant Dash, CEO of Tata Starbucks, Reserve outlets offer what he calls an elevated coffee experience by introducing customers to an 'intimate, multi-sensory' coffee experience.
These coffees are brewed in front of the customers and served to them completing the ‘experience’. The Reserve menu is in addition to the standard Starbucks menu and is prices at a slight premium to the regular offerings.
The opening of the reserve store in Mumbai, where it has the most number of stores already, is highlighting the growing push to elevate the coffee-drinking experience for India’s rapidly growing coffee market.
Also read: Decoding the Indianisation of Starbucks
According to Dash, India’s coffee culture and market is growing and the response to Starbucks stores not just in metros, but also in smaller markets has given the company the confidence that a format like this would work in India.
“The Indian consumer today is well-travelled. There is a section of consumers that wants a more elevated coffee experience and this is the right time for the Reserve store,” he told CNBC-TV18.
The 5,200 sq ft Reserve Store in Mumbai has been done by Sonal Vasave and Makarand Narkar, who recreated the famous Starbucks mermaid into a mural, and architect-artist Ankon Mitra, who created a sculpture befitting the space.
Coffee aficionados can find two bars within the store, one which serves customers their favourite regular and seasonal Starbucks drinks. The second bar, however, offers speciality beverages made using unique brewing methods like pour-over, Chemex, siphon, and Nitro Cold Brew among others.
The coffee shop serve small-lot single origin coffees at Reserve stores which are what it calls some of the rarest coffees in the world including Starbucks Reserve Bolivia Sol de la Mañana, Starbucks Reserve Rwanda Sholi, Starbucks Reserve Sumatra Kerinci.
Also read: Starbucks products an 'affordable luxury' despite recent price hikes, says CEO Howard Schultz
While this will not be the only Reserve store in India, the company currently has no concrete plans on when and where it will open the next store. Dash says they will see how the consumer reacts to this store before charting out an expansion plan for this format.
Ten years since its launch, earlier this year Starbucks also piloted a smaller size beverage size priced relatively lower and some India-specific offerings like Masala chai.
However Dash says the idea behind this pilot currently underway in four cities is not so much price-led, but more a response to consumer surveys that suggested Indians preferred their coffee and tea is smaller sizes.
The company will now observe the response to this pilot over the next 3-4 months and then decide on whether it wants to expand these offerings further.
Last year saw the company’s highest store expansion, which also included entering eight new markets. Dash says the momentum continued into this year where it entered 10 new markets with 30-odd stores in the first half of this year.
Starbucks entered the Indian market in 2012 through a 50/50 joint venture with Tata Consumer Products and currently has 300+ stores across 36 cities. It serves over 3.3 lakh customers in India every week.
First Published: Oct 18, 2022 12:22 PM IST
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