Fresh & Honest Cafe `vends' oats porridge  ( September '21,2001, HBL)

THE Chennai-based Fresh and Honest Cafe Ltd, a part of the Sterling Infotech Group, has recently introduced oats porridge from its string of vending machines.

Not just oats, passengers can opt for soup, coffee or tea. For some time now, the aromatic smell of coffee has been wooing customers at public places such as railway stations, airports and hospitals.

All over India, in 750 locations, Fresh & Honest Cafe has installed its vending and brewing machines which dispense six varieties of coffee, two kinds of tea, three types of soup, cereal, malt hot and cold chocolate.

Mr Charles Chacko, Director, Fresh & Honest Cafe, said the company entered into this business six years ago and has invested around Rs 25 crore. The company started making a profit after the first three years, which Mr Chacko declined to disclose.

The high cost of entry into this segment has kept many players including multinationals to keep them off. (Each machine costs around Rs 6 lakh and has to be maintained round-the-clock). These machines are imported from Switzerland and have microprocessors for system control and data processing.

The machines are installed in three principal locations -- hotels, corporates and direct operations (which include airports, railway stations and hospitals). The star hotels opt mainly for the coffee facility. In the hotels, the machines record the number of cups dispensed and charges accordingly.

Recently, the company entered another esoteric food segment, soya milk and tofu. Mr Chacko said soya has some distinct advantages over dairy products, the first being that it is 100 per cent vegetarian. The company's brand Soyfresh is a pilot project for Chennai and will be taken nation-wide once it catches on. The soya products are manufactured at the company's plant in Porur near Chennai.

Fresh & Honest Cafe sources high quality coffee beans from the estates in Hassan and Chickmagalur districts in Karnataka, and couriers it for processing at its roastery in Porur. The company also plans to export high quality roasted Indian coffee beans.

The company is a distributor for Illy Cafe which is imported from Italy. It is supplied in sealed tins with a shelf-life of more than two years both in regular and decaffeinated forms. The dehydrated instant soups are from Haco Ag, a Swiss company, and the chocolate powder from Domaco, a Swiss ISO 9001 certified pharmaceutical company.