V G Siddhartha - From son of coffee planter to founder of India’s biggest coffee chain
| Date :01-Aug-2019 |
NEW DELHI:
HE wanted to be an investment banker and had little interest in his family’s coffee business. But a chat with the owners of German coffee chain, Tchibo, got V G Siddhartha to set up the Indian rival of Starbucks, before debt and tax woes allegedly led him to end his life. Siddhartha, the founder of India’s biggest coffee chain, Cafe Coffee Day, was confirmed dead on Wednesday, days after he went missing.
A purported letter written by him indicated that pressure from banks, investor and tax authorities drove him to end it. Coming from a family that has a 140-year history of growing coffee, Siddhartha, around 60, initially dabbled in stock trading and wanted to work as an investment banker in Mumbai after completing his Master’s degree in Economics from Mangalore University. In 1984, he launched his own investment and venture capital firm Sivan Securities in Bangalore and began investing the profits from his start-up to buy coffee plantations in Karnataka’s Chikmagalur district.
Around this time, he also began taking interest in his family’s coffee business. In 1993, he set up a coffee trading company called Amalgamated Bean Company (ABC) with an annual turnover of over Rs 6 crore and over the years it increased to over Rs 2,500 crore. Inspired by a chat with the owners of Tchibo, a German coffee chain, Siddhartha decided to open his own chain of cafes in a country that had no formative cultural grounding in cappuccinos. He opened Cafe Coffee Day’s first outlet on Bangalore’s upscale Brigade Road in 1994 with a tag line ‘A lot can happen over a cup of coffee’.
It’s now the largest chain of coffee shops in India, a nation of tea drinkers, with 1,750 cafes in more than 200 cities, including outlets in Prague, Vienna and Kuala Lumpur. Coffee Day went public in 2015. Siddhartha, currently has 200 exclusive retail outlets selling his brand of Coffee Day powder all over South India. ABC is also India’s largest exporter of green coffee.
Expanding his business portfolio, Siddhartha ventured into IT sector and founded Global Technology Ventures Ltd that identifies, invests and mentors technology companies. He also entered the financial sector with investment firm Sivan Securities Private Ltd. The company has three subsidiaries - Chetan Wood Processing Pvt Ltd, hospitality business Barefoot Resorts and timber trading - Dark Forest Furniture Company.