How to Start a Coffee Shop Business in India?

You can start a coffee shop as a franchise business. You will need coffee making supplies, kitchen items, and cutlery. If you have started a business as a coffee franchise, you cannot even choose the color and design of a plate or a spoon. Every specialty that you serve is decided by the franchisor. However, if you want to create your own brand, you can come up with innovative coffee and cool drink recipes.

Coffee Shop Business

You can do the following to perform a market research:

• Import coffee beans if you are looking at specialty. Experiment with a few coffee recipes and give some freebies to your family and friends and ask for a feedback. Improvise till you can reach a WOW effect for your specialty recipe.
• After you have studied the standard coffee recipes, you can also make an innovation in the existing recipes and create your own version of mocha, ales, cappuccinos, cold coffees, etc.

Create a business plan

Once you have succeeded in this, create a business plan and jot down the menu of your successful experiments. Create a business plan that includes the capital that is needed to invest in leasing and decorating your coffee shop, expenses on inventory, man power, training, supplies, etc. You also have to assign a considerable amount of budget for implementing marketing and promotion strategies.

Set up your store

Once you are done taking the required permits and licenses for your store, you can set up your store and hire experienced workers who know how to make awesome coffee and other confectionery items.

Plan your menu

Your coffee shop menu must have a variety of coffee flavors, and a couple of categories of coffee and other drinks. You can also come up with interesting set of pastries, pudding, rolls, sandwiches, and hand foods that goes well with the coffee menu. You can also add sundaes and ice creams to the coffee menu.

Choose your location and mode of operation

You can also have a coffee kiosk in a mall as that would cost much lesser compared to starting a standalone coffee shop.

You could also use a coffee truck as this would be one of the most inexpensive options needing only driving license for commercial vehicles and road tax if you travel to different cities selling your coffee. Even within your city, a coffee truck would be a great idea. You can halt near the offices or colleges during lunch or evening hours and make a good business out of it.

Capital and decoration

Starting a coffee shop is the easiest but depending upon the kind of set up you want to have, and this becomes the deciding factor of the cost that would be needed to set up this shop. On an average, the minimum cost required to start a coffee shop with good interiors in a good location will cost you close to fifteen to twenty lakhs.

You can use a variety of funky décor and creative furniture for this coffee shop as it would add up to create a niche about your coffee brand. You can also get creative with the outdoor signage that you want to use.

You could use flags, lamp posts, etc outside your coffee shop with the name or logo of your store printed on them. This would create an insignia of sort for your store and will be helpful in driving more customers to your store. You can also assign sign girls or sign boys who will stand outside your coffee shop and invite customers to your store.