Profile Overview
Rasalika, Saudamini, and Krittivas Dalmia are the sibling founders of Kaffa Cerrado, a Delhi-based specialty coffee roastery built over fifteen years of learning, experimentation, and quiet persistence. Today, Kaffa Cerrado is known for its measured approach, focusing on clean profiles and the natural character of the bean. Built through word of mouth and shared roles, the Dalmias have quietly established Kaffa Cerrado as a steady, enduring presence in India’s evolving specialty coffee landscape.
In the late 1990s, a man in Delhi began thinking about coffee. Not the instant kind, but something better. He explored bringing quality coffee from Europe, made enquiries, and even considered opening a café. But imports were complicated, the timing felt off, and the idea slipped away. A few years later, Barista launched with almost the exact format he had imagined. He watched it unfold from the sidelines, then moved on.
Years later, his children would return to the same idea and quietly spend fifteen years building what he once imagined.
In 2011, Rasalika, Saudamini, and Krittivas Dalmia started Kaffa Cerrado, a specialty coffee roastery in Delhi, with little more than curiosity and instinct. None of them came from coffee. None of them had experience in roasting. What they did have was the same belief their father once held, that India deserved better coffee. What followed was not a straight path, but fifteen years of learning, failed shipments, evolving tastes, and the slow work of building something that would eventually find its place in India's growing specialty coffee landscape.
To explore everything from everywhere is Kaffa Cerrado
- The Dalmia Siblings
Three Paths Into Coffee
Rasalika, the eldest, had trained as a Montessori teacher and completed a baking course in London. Saudamini had studied economics and pursued ceramics before completing a graphic design course during the pandemic. Krittivas, the youngest, had been living in New York, where his exposure to the beverage was largely limited to Starbucks. What brought all three of them into the same room, working on the same idea, was something simpler. Their father had always believed India deserved better coffee, and in 2011, they decided to find out if he was right.
That year, the family flew to Italy, to a small town near Venice, to meet a coffee importer their father had originally contacted back in 2000. When they reached out again over a decade later, the same person was still there. They made the trip, sat down with cups of coffee that they had not tasted anything like before, and came home with a direction. There was no market research behind the decision.
"We liked drinking it," Krittivas says, "and we were sure there would be others who would also want it."
They started the way many good things start, on instinct, and on faith.
Rasalika, Saudamini, and Krittivas Dalmia built Kaffa Cerrado together, bringing different backgrounds and ideas into the business.
From Importing to roasting
What followed was an education that could not have been planned. The family's first attempt was to import roasted coffee directly from Italy. It arrived months late, held up in customs, and the cup it produced bore little resemblance to what they had tasted abroad.
"It was just not what we had tasted there," Krittivas says.
They tried a different route, importing green beans instead, and having them roasted at a facility in Chennai. The result was the same disappointment.
"We realised there's something called roasting," he says. "And we needed to get into that."
In 2013, they invested in a Loring roaster, one of the first to arrive in India. They also brought in a trainer from the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe to learn roasting from the ground up.
All three siblings sat through the training together - cupping, tasting, building the vocabulary of a craft they were only beginning to understand. Before that, Krittivas admits, their entire frame of reference was binary. This coffee tastes good; this one doesn't.
"There was no real language for it," he says.
The training changed that. Krittivas went on to complete formal roasting certifications in Europe. Rasalika and Saudamini trained alongside him.
Even their father sat through the cupping sessions. He did not take the formal exams, nor did he learn to roast. But he learned to taste. Today, every time the siblings introduce a new coffee to the range, he is the first person they put it in front of. He has his espresso, gives his view, too light, too dark, needs adjusting, and Krittivas goes back to the roast profile.
"He'll have his espresso, Americano, and be like, I like it or I don't like it," Krittivas says.
Fifteen years on, that informal verdict still matters.
The roasting itself continued to evolve long after the training ended. Over the years, as their understanding deepened and the quality of Indian green coffee improved, they moved towards lighter profiles. Their darkest roast today is not as dark as it used to be. It is a small shift that tells a larger story, of three people who kept paying attention, kept adjusting, and never stopped learning from the cup in front of them.
The siblings moved into roasting early on, learning the craft and building their skills over time.
Building Together
Running a business with family is not straightforward, and the Dalmias do not pretend otherwise. Roles within Kaffa Cerrado have never been formally defined. Krittivas leads on roasting. Saudamini handles the brand's visual and creative identity, built in part on a graphic design course she completed during the pandemic. Rasalika is the most closely involved in shaping the experience side of the business and works across different areas. Other areas, marketing, admin, and social media, are shared between all three.
"We haven't clearly defined independent roles," they comment. "It just seemed to have worked in this format."
That same fluid approach shaped the way they expanded when they did. Between 2017 and 2020, the Dalmias took the brand beyond the roastery, opening café counters in Delhi, Bombay, and Bangalore, each running as a collaboration with an existing bakery or pizzeria, with both names on the board. The family had always been vegetarian, and every one of these spaces reflected that without compromise, something their father had once doubted was possible in Delhi. At their peak, they were operating around 8 to 10 kiosks. When COVID hit, they shut everything down and never reopened.
Rather than rebuild, they refocused. Kaffa Cerrado has grown entirely through word of mouth, supplying coffee to cafés and restaurants across India, running a small experience centre at the Okhla roastery, and catering events. No outside funding, no aggressive expansion. It is a roastery at its core, and everything else has grown around that.
Kaffa Cerrado’s café spaces were designed with a focus on customer experience, bringing their coffee into a more accessible setting.
A Philosophy Built on Restraint
The Dalmias are not chasing trends. When Krittivas talks about the more experimental end of specialty coffee, the anaerobic fermentations, the yeast co-inoculations, the barrel-aged lots that have become fashionable in recent years, he is unconvinced.
Somewhere we feel the natural flavours of the coffee get lost. There's too much artificial stuff happening.
- Krittivas Dalmia
Their portfolio stays close to what the bean can do on its own. Naturals, honeys, and washed coffees. A few micro-lots for clients who want to explore further. The core stays still, and so, they would argue, does much of how India drinks coffee.
"We're a milk-drinking nation," he says. "It doesn't matter what we flavour it with, haldi, lassi, chai, or coffee."
For most of his generation, coffee entered the home not as a drink in its own right but as a way to make a glass of milk go down. If you could not drink it plain, you had it with coffee stirred in. That habit, he says, is still with us, and the shift towards black coffee, real as it is, is working against decades of it.
It is a shift they have been watching in real time, and one that quietly validates the instinct they started with.
Bringing good coffee closer to people through Kaffa Cerrado’s café space.
The Journey Continues
The name Kaffa Cerrado was chosen with intention. Kaffa is the forest region in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. Cerrado is the largest coffee-growing region in Brazil, the world's biggest producer. They wanted, Krittivas says, "to explore everything from everywhere," and they did not want to limit it. The name holds that ambition quietly. Not to do everything at once, but to stay curious, to keep learning, and to bring something real to the cup.
What Rasalika, Saudamini, and Krittivas have built is not the business they set out to build. The original vision, a café, maybe some baked goods, Italian-imported beans, has long given way to something more considered and more their own. What they built also proved something their father had once doubted: that a vegetarian-only café in Delhi could work.
The struggle of those early years, the failed shipments, the disappointing cups, and the slow realisation that they would have to learn to roast themselves turned out to be the point. It is what made them good at what they do.
When asked about the future, about whether Kaffa Cerrado might expand, open more spaces, grow into something bigger, the siblings were all aligned. The B2B business is working. There is a store-in-store that they are exploring in Gurugram. But a chain, a big rollout, not on the horizon, not right now.
"Let's hope we can keep it going," he said.
Three siblings, one roastery, fifteen years.
Built carefully and built to last.
