Park Street: American coffee chain Starbucks has lined up three stores for its Calcutta debut on Wednesday, making this the company's biggest opening in a single market since it came to India five-and-a-half years ago.
Starbucks is full of beans about expanding in the city, contrary to what its belated entry into the east might suggest. It plans to make the competition froth with three to seven more outlets in the city "within a year or two".
Calcutta is the seventh pit stop in India for the global chain after Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai, where the first outlet opened in October 2012.
The first three stores in the city - at Park Mansion on Park Street, South City and Acropolis - will take Starbucks' India tally to 113.
"Whenever we enter a new market, Starbucks typically looks at six to 10 outlets. Today, we are opening more outlets and doing them faster than before. For instance, never before have we come to any city with three outlets at one go," Sumitro Ghosh, chief executive officer at TATA Starbucks Pvt Ltd, said.
Two more malls, Forum and City Centre Salt Lake, are on the Starbucks radar for the second phase.
Ghosh said it usually takes longer to open an outlet in India than in other countries because of challenges like getting the right real estate at the right price and obtaining approvals and licences for F&B. "But we have shortened the time from 18 months to 12 months and are now in a position to add stores faster."
The coffee chain, headquartered in Seattle, opened 24 outlets across the country in 2017-18. Ghosh, who was born and brought up in the US, said the next fiscal would be bigger. "We created a larger footprint in India in the first five years than we did in China," he said.
The challenge now is to get the tea-loving Calcuttan to acquire a taste for Tahitian Vanilla Macchiato.
According to Starbucks India's Twitter handle, the Park Mansions store starts serving at 8am on Wednesday. The South City outlet is scheduled to open at 11am and the one in Acropolis at 1pm.
