It's one coffee, one customer at a time for Starbucks

The stylish Starbucks outlet at Horniman Circle in South Mumbai is teeming with people. It’s a Friday. Besides, Avani Saglani Davda, CEO of Tata Starbucks, is here.

“What sets us apart is also the fact that there are a number of ‘first ever’ with this joint venture. For instance, India is the first country where Starbucks has gone in for a co-branding. It is also the first country where Starbucks is sourcing the coffee locally.

And... both Starbucks and Tata are jointly working at improving the lives of the workers in the coffee growing region,” Davda says of the Tata-Starbucks association over an hour-long conversation spiced with Kenyan Coffee, blueberry muffins and oatmeal cookies – all Starbucks classics.

As the employees or the store partners serve coffee, she explains how critical they are in offering the “third place” experience to customers.

In the same breath, Davda dismisses the allegations made by a UK newspaper that the employees here were getting “poverty wages”. She terms it as a “media incident” and closes the topic with a firm smile.

Starbucks has added seven stores across Mumbai and Delhi since opening the first in October.

She refuses to divulge details on the stores to be opened but cites an AC Nielsen report that has identified 53 cities as being on the retailers’ chart.

The possible locations include colleges, schools, travel hubs, business parks, hotels, malls and even high street.

Localisation will be key for Starbucks, she says. “We are not here to serve the same thing in every city. We try and create something new not only at every place but also with every segment. For instance, in the airport segment, we have rolled out a multi-grain sandwich for our health-conscious customer.”

Davda smiles at the anecdote about how some tea vendors made a killing, serving tea to the long queue of people outside this Starbucks outlet in the initial days.

Though business remains robust, the long queue has definitely disappeared.

But the young CEO is unfazed at the initial euphoria dying. “We don’t measure our success with the initial queue. We measure it with the number of people coming back. And my store manager in the Taj Hotel outlet says that everyday, at a particular time, a couple comes to have coffee at Starbucks. And they say that it is not because they love the coffee, but because it is a part of their life now. And for us, that is success.”

Davda also doesn’t believe in waging a price war to win customers. Her mantra simple: one coffee, one customer, one store at a time.