Coffee satchets may come home to you

BANGALORE: As all of us who read comics know, Asterix and his fellow Gauls defied the invincible army of Julius Caesar, courtesy a magic potion brewed by that good old Druid Getafix.

The Coffee Board is presently considering a panacea to the cyclical problem of growers’ surplus beans dragging down average farm-incomes to BPL (below-the-poverty line) levels.

Former United Planters’ Association of Southern India president Anil Bhandari has submitted a proposal to the Union commerce ministry, suggesting that the most effective way of boosting domestic consumption is by piggy-backing the good old NDDB milk-distribution daily home-delivery channel to supply for a few days free sachets of liquid coffee concentrate (LCC).

Mr Bhandari’s proposal is a fascinating mix of the old and the new. The NDDB distribution network for home-delivery of milk sachets is old enough to be accepted as a daily ritual along with the morning newspaper. The new facet is that technology has developed in the US and Europe to an extent where microbe-free LCC with a shelf-life of six months is being retailed in mom-and-pop stores/hypermarkets as something which almost combines the taste of pure filter-coffee with the convenience of instant.

What Mr Bhandari envisages is a decentralised model where roasters in different parts of different cities in the non-coffee consuming regions of the country are co-opted on to a national programme of preparing LCC to the specifications of the latest technology and then handing over the sachets to the nearest NDDB outlet. “If every member of every middle-class family in India drinks one cuppa coffee a day, that will help take care of not just our surplus beans but the world’s,” he says.

It need not be a coincidence that, some 140 km from Bangalore, in India’s Jasmine City of Mysore, Harold Pereira, a coffee grower with an engineering background, has teamed up with four others to develop a technology for LCC. The quintet have set up a company called Hindustan Food & Beverages, which has a capacity to manufacture 1,000 litres of LCC a day and with a packaging unit for selling in either 500-ml bottles or cartons containing 500 sachets of 20 ml each, enough for a cuppa. Pereira is now in talks with a leading player in the foods business to distribute his LCC in India’s non-coffee-drinking regions.

Says retailing expert and Coffee Board member Harish Bijoor, “Out of the box solutions are needed to tackle the cyclical crisis in India’s coffee-cultivating heartland.”