Once equated to the former Starbucks CEO by an admirer, the billionaire entrepreneur from Chikmagalur is best known for how his coffee chain touched even small-town India
Café Coffee Day founder VG Siddhartha, who was missing for close to two days, has been found dead in the backwaters of the river Netravathi near the southern coastal town of Mangaluru. Speculation was rife that he had killed himself after being last seen on a bridge over the river on the evening of July 29.
It’s not clear as to why Siddhartha took this extreme step, while in a letter purported to have been written by him recently, the entrepreneur said he had failed in building a profitable business model and that he could no longer face the stress of dealing with creditors. Coffee Day group, which has interests in coffee retail, real estate, logistics, hospitality and finance, faced several thousands of crores in debt.
Once described as “India’s Howard Schultz” (former CEO of Starbucks) by marketing guru Harish Bijoor, Siddhartha is best known for the large chain of quick-service restaurants he established, under the Café Coffee Day brand, which is by far the biggest such chain in India. That the chain touches small town India too, in far-flung locations—from Leh in the north to the Western Ghats along the south—is a unique feature of the business.
The restaurants around the country are shut today as a mark of respect for their founder.
Shortly after taking his group public in the form of Coffee Day Enterprises Limited, Siddhartha had told Forbes India in an interview in November 2015 that he had once wanted to join the Indian armed forces but didn’t get through the National Defence Academy exam. As a young adult, he had also wanted to become a communist leader, but was disillusioned by the corruption he came across. Instead, he pursued a career in the stock markets in Mumbai and Bangalore, and used the money he made to expand the coffee plantations his father had bought in the 1950s.
Siddhartha, 59, was born into a family that grew coffee since all the way back in 1870. A split in the family gave his father the money to buy a large plantation in Chikmagalur in 1956. Today, Siddhartha’s family owns some 12,000 acres of coffee plantations, and Coffee Day exports 20,000 tonnes of coffee.