Tata Coffee Ltd. will start operating a new facility by the end of August to roast premium coffee beans for the global coffee chain Starbucks Corp., the Indian company said Thursday.
The facility will be in Kushal Nagar, Coorg in Karnataka and cost 30 million rupees ($535,465) to build, according to the Hindu Business Line. Hameed Huq, company's managing director, said the new facility will supply new Starbucks' in India which are set to roll out later this year, and it will also send the beans to its outlets abroad as well. The company exports instant coffee to major coffee producers in Japan, Russia, South East Asia and to the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries.
Tata Coffee, a unit of Tata Global Beverages Ltd., signed a formal agreement earlier in January to supply coffee roasted with Starbucks technology to the U.S.
Tata Coffee finance ED Deepak Kumar told the newspaper that the expansion will be completed by March 2013 and is being done at an investment of 550 million rupees ($9.8373 million).
"But in spite of more than doubling, the per capita consumption is still low," he added.
