Bopanna: A Life Built Around Coffee, Systems, and Seeing the Long Term

Learning the Language of Taste: Tea Tasting and ITC

Bopanna’s professional life began at Carritt Moran & Co., a tea auctioning firm with a tony 130-year legacy, as a trainee tea taster at age 21. His job was not just to train his palette, but to understand why a cup of tea tasted the way it did and how to tweak it to consumer needs. He travelled frequently to tea plantations, observing how plucking, withering, rolling, and drying transformed the final beverage, and to markets to interact with customers.

“That gives you the basics of organoleptic sensory evaluation linked always to the consumer,” he explained. “You see very clearly how processing impacts taste and how consumer preferences vary.”

This grounding became crucial as India’s coffee industry began to liberalise. In 1993–94, when he joined ITC Ltd.’s International Business Division, the company decided to venture into agri-commodities beyond tobacco and tasked Bopanna, fresh from his training in tea, with helping set up its international coffee export division. At the time, it felt almost like a startup within a conglomerate.

“You’re with ITC, but you’re working on coffee?” people would ask.

The scepticism was familiar, but so was the opportunity. His role was expansive, encompassing both strategic and operational responsibilities, with a focus on building coffee-sourcing networks across Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala. Bopanna’s deep roots in the planting regions helped him forge partnerships with growers and coffee mills (curing works): Tata Coffee in Coorg, Chamundi Curing Works in Chikmagalur, and Pandian Curing Works in Tamil Nadu, to process high-quality green coffee for export.

“We would purchase raw coffee from growers, mill it, grade it (collectively referred to as curing), and then market it overseas,” he said.

Once the harvesting was done and the purchased raw coffee reached the mills, Bopanna spent much of his time in Europe and the Far East, visiting customers: traders and roasters. This made sense given that nearly two-thirds of Indian coffee was exported, primarily to Western Europe, especially Italy, Belgium, and Germany. Indian coffee, he learned quickly, rarely went straight to consumers.

“These key markets in Europe are not only heavy consumers of coffee but are massive re-export hubs too. Indian coffee moved efficiently, but invisibly, folded into blends with little recognition of origin, says Bopanna.

By the time Bopanna moved from ITC to Coca-Cola India, he understood both the strengths and the limitations of Indian coffee. The supply was strong. The systems worked. But identity was missing.

The Coca-Cola Company, Japan, and Building Coffee at Scale

Bopanna joined The Coca-Cola Company in 1997 with a singular focus: coffee. At the time, Coca-Cola’s trading business included multiple agricultural products. One of the first things he did was narrow that focus and decide that coffee had to become the centre.

Japan was the first testing ground, with well-established templates to learn from, such as Georgia Coffee. Coca-Cola Japan owned nearly a million vending machines there, dispensing Ready to Drink canned coffee directly to consumers, creating a fully controlled route to market.

“That’s the USP and competitive advantage,” Bopanna explained. “Because when one owns the distribution system, you can innovate and build your Brand around a robust coffee portfolio with cutting-edge consumer insights and reach consumers through it… at scale.”

Working with the Coca-Cola Japan team, Bopanna proposed something radical to his managers back in India, for the time: a branded Indian coffee, sold directly to consumers in an overseas market. In 1998, The Coca-Cola Company purchased over 2,000 tonnes of Indian Plantation A and B coffee for a branded Ready to Drink Coffee in a can, “GEORGIA Madras Blend” for the Japanese market. It was among the earliest examples of Indian coffee being branded and sold directly to consumers. For a country that exported most of its coffee anonymously, this was quietly historic.

Concurrently in India, Bopanna identified another gap. Café culture was emerging, but execution lagged. Espresso was complex, machines were expensive, and consistency was rare.

“You can buy the best beans and the most expensive machine,” he said, “but if you don’t know how to bring the two together, the result can be disastrous.”

His solution became known as the “café in a box”. Coca-Cola India would supply branded roasted coffee, premixes, milk powder, cocoa, equipment, service, and most importantly, on-premise brand activation to its key customers. Recognising India’s price sensitivity and diverse regional consumer usage and attitudes, his strategy and business plan involved launching multiple beverage variants, dispensed through automatic roast-and-ground and pre-mixed powder machines. Bopanna and his team at Coke India sourced technology and machinery from Italy and the Netherlands while simultaneously developing local vendors. At the time, this level of automation was new in India, and the model worked. Coca-Cola secured McDonald’s coffee business in India, the first time McDonald’s sourced coffee from Coca-Cola anywhere in the world. This Success caught the attention of the Coke and McD’s Global teams. Soon, Bopanna and his team were asked to replicate the model across eight countries in the Middle East and in South Africa.

From there, the business model went global. Bopanna joined Coca-Cola’s global marketing team, helping shape brands like Far Coast and CHAWǪA. His role involved travelling across Asia to identify cities for flagship cafés. Singapore emerged as the choice for Asia, alongside Oslo and Toronto. These were premium spaces, designed to showcase what coffee could be when systems, branding, and seamless execution aligned. He moved to Singapore and spent the next 7 years growing the Branded Freshly Brewed Café in a box model across Asia Pacific, the Middle East & Africa.

The Coca-Cola Company promoted Bopanna to a Global role and posted him to the Head office in Atlanta, where he spent another 7 years expanding the Away from Home, Fresh Brewed coffee business model and brands into markets in Europe and Latin America.

Alongside this, Bopanna quietly built something ahead of its time: a global coffee competency centre in Bangalore. Coffee from El Salvador, Brazil, India, and beyond was evaluated, and blends were created for the company’s global markets, where the Brewed Beverages Model was launched with key customers and away-from-home channels.

“Long before the acronym became fashionable,” he said, “we had a GCC for coffee in Bangalore.”

The success of the GCC, Bopanna says, throughout the Crop to Cup journey was thanks to a core team of coffee professionals he built, who largely stayed together from 1999 until he hung up his boots at Coke in 2019.

In 2019, Bopanna relocated to India and returned to his roots in Coorg, carrying decades of operational and market knowledge to open a new chapter in his ongoing journey with coffee.

Returning to the farms: BIOTA, Chombuka Coorg Coffee, and the Long View

For years, Bopanna jokes, his farms were “running on love and fresh air.” Managed largely from afar, the farms lacked the day-to-day attention they needed. When he returned in 2019, he made a firm decision: no coffee would be sold until the agronomy and field practices on the farms were world-class, based on local/traditional and Global Re-Generative Agriculture best practices.

The process took nearly three years, with infrastructure being rebuilt rapidly along the way. Processing and field practices that had taken generations to evolve and develop in Coorg were compressed into a few intense seasons. With the help of experienced professionals like Mr Dhyan Chengappa and young talent like Mr I.A. Rohit, field operations and on-farm practices with a focus on quality systems were put in place, after which innovations in post-harvest processing began.

Today, that attention to detail is evident across the estate, reflected in both restored machinery and everyday practice. An old CVS pulper has been brought back into use, processing fruit harvested only at full ripeness over multiple rounds rather than in a single pass. Fermentation takes place in drums, while drying is treated as a careful, closely observed process. The coffee is spread on bamboo drying tables, made from bamboo grown on the farms and crafted by resident labour. Shade nets are used during the afternoon heat, and tarpaulin covers them at night to protect them from dew. Extending the drying period, he has found, leads to a marked improvement in quality.

The coffee farms' elevation, ranging from 1,000 to 1,200 metres, adds another layer of influence. On one plot, wild fig trees planted during its Arabica years still stand, their fallen fruit quietly shaping the soil, a difference that, as he puts it, “shows in the cup.”

To introduce his farm's coffee to Roasters in Europe and India, Bopanna launched in 2022, CHOMBUKA Coorg Coffee Ltd. Never intended to be a mass-market product, volumes remain limited primarily to specially prepared coffees from his Sampigehalla and Athikaad Estates, both of which are rainforest (RA) certified under Biota Coorg FPC’s group certification programme. Alongside his own farms, Bopanna also selectively sources from Biota Coorg FPC, a successful farmer-producer organisation in Coorg, for which he served as one of its founding Directors. Established during a period of low prices, just before COVID struck and throughout the pandemic, Biota Coorg FPC shipped 15–16 containers to six countries without quality issues. “That’s something we are very proud of,” he said. For Bopanna, the FPO was never just about selling coffee.

“If you just want to sell coffee, you don’t need an FPO,” he said. “The intent was to create a brand for Coorg coffees.”

This philosophy extends to how he views prices. Coffee, he explains carefully, is a globally traded commodity with an efficient price discovery mechanism.

“The future markets for coffee are like the stock market,” he said. “Today's traded prices factor in what market participants see in the future.”

Distrust of coffee traders, he believes, based on a few inevitable bad eggs, hurts growers more than volatility does. Holding out for last year’s peak prices, he warned, “is a recipe for disaster.” Instead, he advocates that coffee growers understand the roles of various players in the value chain who bear financial risk, grasp the basics of how futures markets work, and build trust-based relationships. Active collaboration / collective approach, crop diversification, and long-term approach supported, in Coorg’s case, by Arabica as well as crops like pepper and horticulture would help buffer volatility.

Bopanna is in no hurry, and CHOMBUKA Coorg is intended to grow at a measured pace. The ambition is not scale, but recognition for Coorg, for Indian coffee, and for the systems that enable sustained quality and the “sustainable economic viability of growing quality coffee”. After decades of shaping coffee for the world, he has returned to his roots, focusing on coffee at home with a patience born of experience. Every decision reflects years of learning and a deep respect for the craft. His vision is clear: to shine a light on Coorg’s rich coffee heritage.

As he puts it, “My whole point was to really showcase Coorg coffees. To create a brand for Coorg, and present very good quality coffee to roasters.”