Umberto Doglioni Majer

As cafe culture is picking up steam in India supported by a young population leaning more towards coffee instead of tea, players in the coffee eco-system, largely dominated by European companies, are looking at India as the next frontier. Coffee equipment manufacturers and brands are out to take their engagement with the Indian market from a mere trade and distribution relationship to deeper and stronger tie ups in terms of developing market relevant products collaboratively and eventually setting up facilities for manufacturing in India. “Our attempt is to listen to the local partners and design products relevant to the customer needs,” said Umberto Doglioni Majer, president and CEO of Carimali clarifying the mission of his company in the India market and partnership with Kaapi Machines, an Indo-German joint venture company, which is one of the leading B2B players in the Indian coffee industry.

Sharing his understanding of the coffee market in India and its potential, Majer said that India is going through the same road map that other Asian countries like Japan and China have gone through— transition from a predominantly tea drinking culture to coffee culture—a few decades ago.

To coincide with the visit of Majer, Carimali and Kaapi Machines announced the launch of Carimali GLOW, a coffee vending machine suitable for small and medium sized coffee shops with features such as digital temperature control, electronic pre-infusion, customisable LED lights, etc.

“In markets like India, we have to learn the market needs before introducing a machine. India is too early for a hi-end coffee machine as volumes haven’t reached the levels to make RoI sense,” he said, adding that Indian consumers like to have coffee with milk and in high temperatures.

Although brand Carimali is quite well-entrenched in India market as the brand has been the backbone of many popular cafe chains of India, Majer said that they intend to take their engagement in India market to more “strategic” levels in a “proper structured” way going forward with Kaapi Machines.

Majer said that they would even explore manufacturing in India as the coffee eco-system matures and reaches a certain size.

“We are a more than 100-year-old company with a wide range of technology in the traditional Barista coffee machines and automatic machines. The company started in 1919 and by 1960, we had introduced automatic coffee machines. We are pioneers in espresso and Italian coffee and no company has such a long history,” he said.

Talking about the partnership, Abhinav Mathur, MD, Kaapi Machines who have been the distributors of Carimali for India and the region for almost five years said that the Italian company is the only European manufacturer who has both traditional and automatic machines and are quite flexible when it comes to designing products. He said that while most of the European manufacturers follow the same European template as far as machines are concerned, Carimali is quite flexible to tweak design and add features to market requirements.

Mathur said that they have been witnessing 6x growth in sales of Carimali machines in the last three years and it is either number 1 or 2 in the total coffee machine in terms of sales in the country.