Profile Overview
Paresh Gehi is a beverage consultant, barista trainer and founder of Zenagi Coffee. Born and raised in Mumbai, he dabbled with wedding photography, banking and digital agency before finding his calling in coffee. Now based in Indore, he is quietly shaping the coffee revolution in the country, starting with Tier II cities in India.
In the heart of Indore’s burgeoning coffee scene, a name is quietly shaping how the city, and eventually the country, experiences its brews. Paresh Gehi didn’t begin his journey in coffee; he stumbled into it, with a marketer’s curiosity and a learner’s persistence. His transformation from a banker and photographer to a respected barista trainer and beverage consultant is less about overnight success and more about enduring, deliberate learning.
Demystifying coffee is Paresh's motivation
The Mumbai-Dubai-Indore Corridor
Born in a family of wedding photographers in Mumbai, Paresh took up the family business. The wave of digital photography was spreading across the country and Paresh picked it up. But soon, he realised he wanted to do something different. He decided to shift to Dubai to work in a bank.
“That’s when the 2008 financial crisis happened. The company's portfolio shrank and the job market was bad. I was forced to come back to Mumbai,” he said.
In Mumbai, he went back to wedding photography for some time and soon explored the digital agency market in Dubai with a friend. The duo ran the business for some time before personal hiccups forced them to shift back to India.
After coming back home, his parents decided to shift to Indore, Madhya Pradesh. What began as his parents’ white picket fence dream turned into a stepping stone for his long and winding journey into coffee.
The goal was never to become an expert. It was to keep learning.
- Paresh Gehi
From Home Brewing to Aeropress Championship
During the COVID-19 lockdown, when Paresh's digital marketing work slowed down in Indore, he found himself intrigued by the economics of coffee on platforms like Indiamart and Amazon. By this time, Paresh had become a home brewer due to the lack of good cafés in the city. His experience and his curiosity made him explore the possibilities of starting a coffee trading business where he would buy coffee in bulk, market it and sell it.
“But the quality of these coffees in Indiamart and Amazon was very ambiguous. These were mostly wholesale traders who were selling commercial coffee. But my knowledge was limited to beans versus instant coffee; I did not know anything about the difference between specialty and commercial coffee,” he recalls.
After experimenting with Blue Tokai’s whole beans and some basic equipments, he realised he needed to learn more about coffee. That led him to Suhas Dwarakanath’s “Crop to Cup” course at Benki’s Coffee in Bengaluru, a turning point that laid the foundation for his career shift.
Paresh sees Tier-II cities like Indore as ripe for a specialty coffee explosion.
"The goal was never to become an expert. It was to keep learning,” says Paresh.
After being introduced to estate owners, baristas and coffee shops in Bengaluru, Paresh took the time to sip and learn more about specialty coffee.
Armed with new knowledge, Paresh returned to Indore to share his findings. He sourced specialty beans from estates like Baarbara and Salawara, created attractive hampers, and reached out to local cafés.
But nothing clicked. “All of it went down the drain,” he recalls. The issue? Improper machine maintenance, untrained baristas, and a lack of understanding of espresso extraction.
“I think the only narration that came out from it was ‘who is Paresh?’” he recalls.
Instead of giving up, he got to work fixing the root problem: training. With no formal barista education but deep self-study, Paresh developed practical methods for teaching café staff how to dial in espresso, maintain machines, and control key brewing variables.
“Certain things are different when we want to learn about specialty coffee through a good institute versus on the ground. In the latter, if I try to explain to a barista what microns are, they will never get it. The idea is to teach them how to go by taste, the age of the coffee, its density and other tangible parameters,” he explained.
His work caught the attention of Siolim Specialty Coffee Roasters, which was coming up as a new café and co-working space in Indore. There, with some help from Benki’s team, Paresh launched Indore’s first Aeropress Championship. About 16 participants joined, which was a big number at the time when specialty coffee was barely there in Indore.
Soon, he decided to get into the coffee trading business and launched Zenagi Coffee. From there, Zenagi evolved into a consulting service specialising in barista training and beverage design, two pillars that continue to define its business.
The Indore Chapter of Aeropress Championship in 2022
Pushing Through
Transitioning into coffee in his mid-thirties wasn’t easy for Paresh. He admits that his first steps were missteps.
“Investing money, wasting all that money on beans, their distribution, marketing, and still pushing through made me realise that the gestation of a coffee business is going to take three to five years,” Paresh recalls.
“But I decided to give it a shot and I pushed through more.”
What helped was the coffee community itself — welcoming, generous, and eager to teach. Instead of chasing expertise, Paresh focused on learning by doing: brewing constantly, tasting relentlessly, and building a team from the start.
Moreover, his background in marketing led him to “productise” coffee consulting, creating clear packages, deliverables, and case studies.
From a third generation wedding photographer to first generation coffee consultant
Building a coffee community, starting from Indore
Gatebreaking Coffee
Paresh’s mission extends beyond consulting. He is passionate about demystifying coffee for everyday drinkers. Through over 30 events in Indore and now pan-India, he introduces newcomers to brewing.
“In our brewing club, we consciously decided to keep this as a tagline: unlimited coffee, no judgements. You don’t know about coffee? Come. You don’t like coffee? Just come. It’s a club; meeting people, networking, and seeing their new friends behind the counter increases people’s curiosity and urge to learn more about coffee,” he adds.
Whether it is a simple Channi brew or a conversation about cold brews and gochujang chicken sandwiches, Paresh ensures the door to coffee is open for everyone.
“Increasing the number of educated consumers should be our main goal. Making them experience different types of coffee and helping them understand its nuances and impact on lifestyle would help the ecosystem as a whole to grow,” he said.
He sees Tier-II cities like Indore as ripe for a specialty coffee explosion. The city has gone from one to over 15 specialty coffee-focused spaces in just three years. Cafés and coffee shops are evolving beyond frappés, experimenting with alcohol-free coffee raves, and pairing brews with Neapolitan pizzas or Korean sandwiches.
“Thousands of people are learning about coffee on a year-on-year basis. In this space, coffee businesses are bound to fail and succeed. But how many more coffee businesses can there be? Ten times more. We can have ten times more consultants, a hundred times more baristas,” Paresh says.
Even so, Paresh is clear-eyed about challenges. The lack of structured barista training in hotel management courses, the elitism in home-brewing communities, and the misconception that good coffee requires expensive equipment frustrate him. But he counters these by building inclusive spaces like his brewing club and by pushing cafés to collaborate rather than compete.
Today, Zenagi Coffee offers consulting packages that cover everything from bar setup to supply chain design, complete with no-kickback vendor lists and real-time training modules. And even with a team with him, Paresh remains deeply involved in both the technical and human side of brewing.
“The goal was never to become an expert,” he says. “It was to keep learning.”
