Brewing Success: Rage Coffee Is Blending Health With Taste

Rage Coffee uses a proprietary crystallisation technique to preserve the natural flavour and aroma of coffee beans

Serial entrepreneur Bharat Sethi was keen to enter India’s fast-evolving, highly innovative FMCG space to create a niche but could not decide where to start. The year was 2018 when he began researching people’s buying behaviour, demands and market trends to get the lowdown on the best options available. He also spoke to many distributors and retailers of consumer goods and eventually realised that coffee lovers across India had a raw deal all along. “People’s taste buds have evolved, but there was no change in the industry,” said Sethi. So, Rage Coffee hit the market the very next year, serving high-quality, unique concoctions to make one’s daily dose of caffeine exciting and flavourful.

Rage Coffee clocked more than 5x revenue in a year, from INR 4.5 Cr in FY21 to INR 23.5 Cr in FY22. It also expanded its offerings beyond instant coffees and launched a variety of products, including cold coffee brew bags, frothers and other merchandise. In 2022, it ventured into snack bars and cookies, offering gluten-free snacks without preservatives. The brand also set up a 30K sq. ft manufacturing unit in Gurugram. To date, it has added 18 SKUs and added 7.5 Lakh new customers in 2022.

The brand offers a unique range of instant coffees with a healthy dose of plant-based vitamins. The beans are directly sourced from Harar in the Ethiopian highlands, known for some of the best coffees in the world. Instead of the widely available coffee powder, Rage Coffee offers granular instant coffees and uses a proprietary crystallisation and drying technique to preserve the natural taste and aroma of coffee beans. It also takes regular customer feedback and conducts market research to understand what consumers want.

It targets INR 92 Cr in revenue in FY23 and plans to double down on its physical presence to reach more than 10K offline stores by March 2023. Rage Coffee will also work on achieving an INR 500 Cr revenue target in 2025.