A 23-year-old BBA degree holder is serving hygiene with the regular sugarcane juice you have on roadsides.

The Ganna Café - a first-of-its-kind initiative in Patna - has come up on Boring Canal Road around a month ago.

Patna boy Lokesh Rajgiri has turned a van into a customised shop by spending Rs 1.5 lakh. He spent another Rs 2 lakh on buying a crusher and a deep freezer machine and invested Rs 1.5 lakh on sugarcanes. That's how The Ganna Café was born.

The cafe, which initially received five to 10 customers a day, now gets around 400 to 500 daily.

While roadside sugarcane juice sellers extract the juice with bare hands in their open makeshift stalls, for Rajgiri it's hygiene first. He wears gloves throughout his work. Also, the juice is provided in a disposable glass whereas roadside shops serve juice in the same glass used by other customers.

On how he got the idea of starting a sugarcane juice shop, Rajgiri said when he was in his final year of Bachelor of Business Administration at Hyderabad's College of Commerce in 2014, he got the idea of selling sugarcane in a customised van in a neat set-up.

"In Hyderabad, I saw people selling sugarcane juice by using crusher machines. I found it easy to extract the juice through the crusher. In Patna, I had only seen sugarcane extraction machines, which work manually. However, turning a van into a customised shop for selling sugarcane juice was my idea. The idea was to sell sugarcane juice in a hygienic set-up. There are people who avoid going to roadside sugarcane juice sellers because they sell juice in unhygienic ways on open stalls. I thought why not sell juice in a shop but to make it attractive, I bought a van and customised it with cool interiors and exteriors," said Lokesh.

He said by converting a van into a customised shop, he also saved money that he would otherwise had to spend on renting or purchasing a shop.

Rajgiri said maintaining quality of the product will be his main focus.

"I don't add water or ice in the juice like traditional sugarcane juice sellers do because it affects the quality. I put skin-scraped sugarcane into the deep freezer for a few minutes so that it gets chilled. The chilled sugarcane sticks are put into the crusher to extract the juice," said Lokesh.

He added: "While traditional juice sellers put the sugarcane sticks into the manual extraction machine twice and thrice to extract its juice, I put the canes only once into the crusher to extract the juice. The juice at my shop is not only hygienic but also good in quality."

To add to this, the juice comes in flavours. "Nimbuda (lime), chat-pata, jaljeera, adrakhi, pudina and jhal ras. They range from Rs 10 to Rs 20 per glass," he said.

Rajgiri's customers gave the product a thumbs up. One of them, Animesh Bharti, said: "I discovered the shop two days back. I avoided drinking sugarcane juice from roadside stalls but when I saw the juice being sold in a shop here, I thought to try it and found the service good. I have come here for the second time."