Profile Overview
Harshit, Bharath, and Chaitra are the team behind Bean Good, a Bengaluru-based company that makes coffee concentrates for some of India’s largest beverage brands. What began with bottled decoction sold outside city parks has grown into a business focused on solving a simple but critical challenge in coffee: maintaining consistency as brands scale. Working across manufacturing, R&D, and extraction, they help café chains and QSRs deliver the same cup, every time.
Bharath and Chaitra prepared coffee decoction every night in their small 800-square-foot Uttarahalli space, bottling it in reused, sterilised Bacardi rum bottles. They sold the packed decoction the next morning at high-traffic locations outside Lalbagh and KR Park. This unbranded operation, built purely on a viable product, process, and location, consistently brought in two to three thousand rupees daily, enough revenue to sustain the business.
Harshit was initially uninvolved with the company’s journey, and coffee was not his focus. He became closely involved after the founders sought funding, transforming the steady, small-scale operation into an expanding business.
What they were building at that stage was a ready-to-use liquid coffee concentrate, evolved from this early decoction process. It is brewed and extracted under controlled conditions and used as a base for café-style beverages such as filter coffee, cold coffee, iced Americanos, and others, simply by adding milk or water, depending on the recipe. Instead of requiring fresh extraction, machines, or baristas at every outlet, it standardises coffee at the base level, ensuring the same taste and quality can be replicated across locations and use cases.
Chaitra selling coffee decoction outside Lalbagh in the early days of Bean Good.
Getting the First Yes
In the beginning, most people they approached did not say no, but they did not say yes either. The response was usually the same. The idea was interesting, but they were asked to come back when operating at a larger scale. That could have slowed them down, but instead, it gave them direction, and they kept working until they secured their first real customer, Narasus Coffee Company, a 100-year-old brand.
“That was a turning point,” Harshit says. “Even though they are such a big coffee company, they were open to working with someone like us.”
What stood out to him was the thinking behind that decision.
“They said not everything has to be done in-house. If someone has already spent years developing a stable product, it is worth trying.”
The space where Bean Good’s first batches of coffee decoction were prepared.
At that stage, the business was still small. They were producing around 20 to 25 litres a month, which then moved to 100 to 150 litres and eventually to around 300 litres a month. These were not large numbers, but they were enough to show that the category had potential.
Around the same time, bigger players began entering the space. ID Fresh Food, in particular, spent heavily on educating the market about ready-to-use coffee products.
“That helped the entire category,” Harshit says. “We used that momentum.”
By 2021, they had expanded operations into a larger industrial facility equipped with the required legal, food safety, and quality compliance systems to serve corporate and global brands.
“When we moved in 2022, I had doubts,” he says. “It felt too big. I wondered if we had taken on too much.”
But the demand followed. Within two years, they started working with large brands such as Tata and Unilever, and by 2026, they were producing close to 50,000 litres of coffee concentrate every month.
Solving for Scale
As they scaled production and began working with larger brands, the problem they were solving became more defined. For café chains and quick service restaurants, the challenge was not sourcing coffee but maintaining consistency at scale.
Once a brand grows from five outlets to fifty or five hundred, consistency becomes a problem.
- Harshit
Differences in baristas, machines, and operating conditions meant the same beverage could vary across locations.
Bean Good built its role around solving for that. Instead of supplying beans or running cafés, they focused on developing coffee concentrates that could act as a standardised base. This removed the need for fresh extraction at every outlet and allowed brands to build beverages with far less variation.
From the outside, a coffee concentrate looks straightforward. Inside, it is iterative, technical, and often slow. Every new client starts with a base coffee. From there, the team begins building variations, adjusting beans, roast levels, and extraction parameters to create multiple versions of the same product.
Those samples go back to the client. Feedback comes in. The process repeats.
Sometimes it takes a few rounds. In other cases, it stretches much further. For certain clients, the back-and-forth can extend beyond 50 trials before anything is finalised.
Once it is locked, the formulation is not reused.
“We give them a base product,” he says. “From there, they can scale without worrying about variation, and we do not give that to anyone else.”
This level of customisation only works if the team can move quickly. Delays break momentum. That pace often translates into a hands-on, repetitive workflow. While working with one such client, Harshit and Bharath would travel to the client’s R&D space three times a week for over a year, running trials, taking feedback, and returning with revised versions.
They now operate across two core verticals. The first is white-label manufacturing, producing for a wide range of brands.
“Tata, Unilever, Hatti Kaapi, Leo Coffee, Blue Tokai, Starbucks, Korebi Coffee, pretty much all the coffee brands in the liquid space,” Harshit says.
Even ID Fresh Food, which helped shape the category early on, is now among its clients.
Inside Bean Good’s factory, where coffee concentrate is produced at scale.
The second is their B2B vertical, focused on QSR chains, where the need for standardisation is most immediate. They work with each chain to identify its best-selling beverages and develop corresponding concentrates for use across locations.
Coffee chains use these across multiple formats, from cold beverages to iced Americanos to filter coffee. Filter coffee, in particular, has emerged as their strongest product, though the portfolio now spans over 30 formats and flavours.
Their concentrates are used across cafés, airports, and other high-volume environments where operational simplicity is critical.
“In places like airports, they do not have the bandwidth for fresh extraction,” Harshit says. “We make it easier.”
If the business was about solving for consistency at scale, the real work happened in how the product itself was built and how the process behind it kept evolving.
At the same time, the way they work with clients remains flexible. Some brands come in with their own beans and recipes, where Bean Good operates as a contract manufacturing partner. Others come in with no coffee experience, relying on the team to handle everything from sourcing to final extraction.
“We work at every level. You can come to us with nothing, and we will build the product with you.”
- Bharath
Building Consistency
Even after the formulation is finalised, the real challenge begins. The product has to hold every single time.
Shelf life is not treated as an estimate. It is engineered.
They invested early in certifications and internal systems, becoming one of the first plants in this category to receive standards like FSSC 22000, RFA, MSME ZED Gold, and SEDEX 4-Pillar approvals.
Yet their growth has not been driven by visibility.
“Everything we have got is through word of mouth,” Harshit says.
Bean Good’s coffee concentrates testing lab.
Long-Term Direction
That same clarity shapes how Harshit, Bharath, and Chaitra think about what comes next.
Bean Good operates in a category that is still taking shape. In markets like the US and Australia, systems built around liquid coffee are already more established. In India, that shift has begun but is still unfolding.
The opportunities are visible. Premium instant coffee is one direction. Freeze-dried formats built on their concentrates are another. There is also growing international interest.
But none of this is being rushed.
“I do not want to lose focus,” Harshit says. “We have to first become the best at what we are doing.”
For now, the priority remains depth.
The business was never built around the ritual of coffee. It was built around identifying a gap and solving it at scale.
What began with Bharath and Chaitra selling bottled decoction outside city parks has grown into a business that now supplies some of the country’s largest beverage brands. Together with Harshit, they continue to focus on a simple challenge: helping coffee stay fresh, consistent, and reliable as brands scale.
