Wagh Bakri to scale up its tea lounges

Parag Desai, executive director of Wagh Bakri Tea Group, likes the company's retail initiative to be called the Starbucks of tea retail in India. He is referring to the chain of tea lounges - branded, simply, Wagh Bakri Tea Lounge - that his company has set up in Jaipur, Mumbai, Delhi and Ahmedabad.

"It all began as an exercise to get consumer insights 10 years ago; we never thought it would become such a big hit," says Desai. "It is a business which I was never serious about, but now that my customers are pushing me into it, I am going to scale it up."

The Rs 1,000-crore company currently has seven tea lounges and the plan is to double the number, and it is in the process of hiring talent who understand the retail business.

"Retailing is an altogether different business; we need to equip ourselves to scale it up to the next level," says Desai.

The tea lounges serve over 45 varieties of tea, which include varieties of Darjeeling and Assam teas, organic teas, tea mocktails, and even ice-cream tea. Apart from the teas, the other big attraction for consumers, according to Desai, are the array of Indian snacks they offer at the lounges.

"The snacks we offer in each of our lounges are as per local tastes and preferences. So, if the tea lounge at Mumbai or Ahmedabad offer local favourites like bakharwadi or dhokla, the lounge in Delhi would offer samosas and pakoras."

The over 100-year-old tea company is present in the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh with its branded packaged teas, and is planning to enter North India this year.

So, why did it take so long to go pan-India? "We are a very distribution-led company and every State that we enter we make sure we are available in each and every village, and that takes time." In fact, till 1985, Wagh Bakri tea was available only in the city of Ahmedabad. "We were being sold loose. We got into packaged tea in 1985 and thereafter started expanding."

The company also has an online platform, buytea.com, through which it sells tea in over 30 countries. "We created our online platform more than a decade ago when e-commerce was a distant dream," says Desai.