In the Oscar-winning film, Slumdog Millionaire, the protagonist, Jamil Malik, born in a Mumbai slum, finds work as a ‘chaiwallah’ or tea seller at an Indian outsourcing company. The juxtaposition of the old and new India is a deliberate device used by Co-Director Danny Boyle to highlight the paradox of modern and ancient occupying the same space. Jamil typifies the scores of people who serve tea in India. Indeed, India’s current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, proudly says his first job was that of a humble chaiwallah. Hence, the likeness of the chaiwallah – the roadside tea vendor who brews and serves the beloved cup of chai in a large metal kettle or pot – has been woven into the cultural and social fabric of the subcontinent.
This year, a company called Chai Point used AI and robotics to modernize that role, serving different varieties of chai-tea and green tea to pilgrims at a massive spiritual gathering called Maha Kumbh Mela, taking place form January 13th to February 26th in the North Indian city of Prayagraj.
With various recipes stored in a cloud-based system, "Brewing Bots" precisely concocted temperature-controlled vats of chai, dispensed in paper cups to satisfy the needs of tea-craving visitors. Each patron, perhaps tired and parched after their pilgrimage at the confluence of three holy rivers, didn’t even have to fumble with bills or coins to quench their chai-thirst; they completed their purchase by scanning a QR code using their smartphone or tapping an ATM or credit card. Just as in Danny Boyle’s acclaimed film, the modern and ancient occupied the same space.
With its automated character, Chai Point can best be described as an F&B company built on a technological framework, founded in India’s main tech hub, Bangalore in 2010, where operations began with a three-store pilot growing into a mass Indian brand. It now has over 180 outlets in eight cities where hundreds of thousands of cups are made daily.
At the Maha Kumbh Festival, Chai Point had set up a multitude of small kiosk-style chai outlets on the grounds of the event, serviced by employees who interact with the semi-automatic Brewing Bots all working in tandem to satisfy the needs of devotees, many doing liquid fasts. At the time of writing this article, Chai Point’s data indicated that they had already served in the tens of millions of cups of tea at the venue.
The company also has a fully automated version for offices, hospitals, factories, and other spaces that attract regular consumers.
Technology like this has never been so successfully deployed at a large gathering, especially in a parochial South Asian town where, according to estimates, the festival footfall was a record-breaking 663 million.
It also marked the first time Brewing Bots pitted their tea-preparation skills alongside traditional tea sellers in India. Prime Minister Modi, who like the other pilgrims took a ritual bath in the confluence of three sacred rivers during the festival, ushered in the age of “Digital India” by promoting online payment platforms and changing up Indian currency to make people less reliant on a cash culture. He has even launched a government cryptocurrency. Notwithstanding his vision of digitization, as a former chaiwallah, he might have had mixed feelings observing Chai Point’s success.
Modi’s possible ambivalence aside, the experience has been overwhelmingly positive for patrons. One woman remarked that amidst the crowds and challenges of Kumbh, it was refreshing to find Chai Point running so smoothly and serving “very tasty” tea. She called it “marvelous.” Another woman who had travelled to the festival with her husband from Bangalore said, “the ginger tea is amazing and very hygienic.” A man, identifying himself as Vimal, visiting from Chhattisgarh, India (a landlocked state in central India) said, “It’s the best tasting tea available at Maha Kumbh.”
For Chai Point’s owner, Amuleek Singh Bijral, servicing the Maha Kumbh Mela constituted a major milestone in the company’s journey. A former engineer and employee of such companies as Microsoft and Dell, Bijral, after returning to academia and earning an MBA from Harvard Business School, decided to do something totally different upon his return to India, trying to innovate in the F&B space.
For many, when they learn of Bijral’s high tech and academic background, they ask, “You left Microsoft to sell tea?” For Bijral, such questions roll off him like water down a duck’s back, for he is not just selling tea, inspired by Starbucks, he is building a brand. In India, tea seemed like an obvious product area on which to innovate.
After water, tea is the most consumed beverage in the world, and in India, the demand for it is astronomical. Researcher A. Shashi George in his paper, "The Scale and Scope of India's Vital Chai Industry," estimates that two-thirds of India’s population consumes tea in some form, with most imbibing around three cups a day. George calculates that this amounts to daily consumption of over a billion cups of tea, most of it in the form of chai-tea.
Bijral had observed that, outside the home, while the demand for tea is also enormous (their own estimate via a YouTube interview is 500 million cups consumed daily, and Instagram influencer Tanay Chawla agrees), the way in which most people acquire their daily tea fix is far from consistent, often being downright frightful in terms of hygiene and experience.
“We [Indians] sort of find this perverse romance in finding chai on the roadside, drinking in a dirty cup,” says Bijral, elaborating that this does a huge “injustice” to the beverage. “Forget about giving quality; people did not have a sense of what’s the right quality. So, all of this looked like a huge opportunity,” he adds.
Bijral’s observations are quite apt in noting that a chaiwallah hawking ambrosia from his bubbling kettle at his hole-in-the wall corner shack or roadside stoop is often the preferred tea vendor of many Indians on the go. They may end up drinking out of dirty glasses or clay mugs. This poses several problems: buying a piping hot cup of chai in a clay or ceramic mug called a "kulad," which may or may not be clean, that might well have been used by someone else, filled to the brim with no handle can be difficult to manage – and a potential health hazard. I doubt one could find someone who hasn’t burnt their lips, tongue, or fingers on a kulad of steaming tea not to mention the possible physical danger posed by spillage.
For Bijral, he felt there had to be a better way to meet this immense demand for the beverage. He set about developing a system that emulates what a chaiwallah does, but in a clean, efficient, and modern way.
Also, chaiwallah’s are not ubiquitous – they may not be allowed in offices or places where hygiene is important, like hospitals. Chai Point’s emphasis on hygiene has helped them enter that space.
Bijral decided to make his company’s USP to provide a hygienic cup of chai of varying flavors (classic, ginger, masala, and even green tea to name a few) on demand in a comfortable air-conditioned environment and at offices, airports, hospitals, factories, homes, and other places, which are hubs where throngs of people congregate and pass through. His aim is to satisfy the inevitable demand for chai that people at such places will have.
Although Bijral's initial vision was to be a replacement for the chaiwallah, even matching them for price at around 25 cents a cup in American terms, he decided to pivot to catering to the 20% of the market comprised of white collar workers with higher disposable incomes, who were willing to pay more for quality.
Studying the market, Bijral came to understand that most chai sold by chaiwallahs was made from dust tea (the sandy byproduct of the tea production process), which is the lowest quality and cheapest tea. This is same type of tea put in most tea bags in India and often powdered spices, sometimes artificial flavorings, are added when masala chai is ordered. So, he decided to use proper Assam black tea, and in instances when the consumer orders masala chai, he was determined to ensure that authentic spices, including fresh ginger, were used to brew the tea.
Typically, a store that offered different types of chai would have to brew them in different vessels, strain, and then pour the tea into a thermal container that could keep it hot. This would be a labor-intensive process, and how would the vendor ensure consistency of cup if fresh ingredients were used in each batch?
This is where Bijral’s tech background came into play. The variety of vending machine technology and software systems used in business processing (point of sales systems and the like) available to purchase off the shelf was plentiful. However, he wanted Chai Point to develop its own, taking the time to tailor the tech to Chai Point’s functional needs and business approach. “I studied the process for six years and wanted the business to define the technology strategy,” says Bijral. The brewing machine was designed to combine ingredients precisely. They are linked together with clones via cloud service where recipes could be stored.
“We built each and every process ourselves,” Bijral heralds, proudly.
Chai Point’s quality cup with its price point being around a quarter of the price of an equivalent volume of chai tea latte from Starbucks and similar upscale vendors led to people showing up at Chai Point outlets with flasks and large mugs with lids in hand to take to the office. Bijral realized then that he needed to “bring Chai Point to the customer" so they could enjoy a cup without having to make a trip to the outlet and fill up a travel container.
They invented their own disposable thermal flask for home and office delivery. “Our first step was to launch the heat retaining ‘use-and-throw’ [sic. disposable] flask. We were the first ones to design that inner polymer, multi-polymer layered pouch, which was BPA free, so very safe, which could be assembled in a cardboard box, and tea could be delivered with the temperature being retained for close to about 60 odd minutes…which subsequently has become now a very significant category in all delivery platforms,” says Bijral. “[This] was our first step to take the chai to the consumer.”
Their second step would be more significant, something they call their “Chai Point Everywhere” Channel.
Until then, Chai Point’s Brewing Bots had worked semi-automatically at their outlets mainly because of the volume of tea required to be prepared. Recipes stored in the cloud would be selected by touching an icon on the display screen by an employee. The robotics inside the machine combined the ingredients into a vat-like vessel for brewing, which would then have to be manually strained and dispensed. The same bot used to prepare masala chai could not be used for green tea, requiring several bots being available in the store for different varieties.
The advantage of the bots, however, is that by deploying them in outlets, Chai Point was setting new benchmarks in the industry for speed, quality, and convenience in workplaces, retail hubs, and high-footfall public spaces. Engineered for efficiency and consistency—brewing up to 16 litres of chai in just 21 minutes—makes Chai Point chai an on-demand experience. It is particularly impressive when one considers the consistency of cup.
However, when Chai Point decided to install bots at offices and other locations where the consumer alone would have to interact with the technology, they innovated ingeniously. All the consumer would be required to do is select the type of tea desired, as an employee would in the store, by touching a display icon, and then tea, milk, spices and other ingredients would be added robotically into an internal vessel just larger than a physical cup. After the requisite brewing time is over (and customers are given the latitude to select the strength of the tea as well) the tea gets dispensed into a cup.
But what if the next person wants a different kind of tea? Unlike the store bots, these bots thoroughly rinse the internal vessel or cup where the tea is brewed, so no residue from previous cups is present to affect the flavor of the next cup. In that way, the Brewing Bot can make two or more different types of tea using the same machine—all from fresh ingredients—without using a packet of instant spice or a tea bag. The bot disposes of the used ingredients as cups are brewed.
It is this artificial intelligence and robotic precision that distinguishes Chai Point’s Brewing Bots from conventional vending machines, making them a revolutionary innovation in automation in the beverage industry.
Unlike common vending machines, the Brewing Bots tailor each cup of tea to the preferences of the customer, who uses the entry display to specify what they want. The brewing action taking place with all ingredients happens inside the machine with the finished result being dispensed into the cup. One won’t see black tea streaming separately from a spout into a paper cup, followed by milk, sugar, and other flavorings as with the common vending machine—it all gets brewed in its entirety in the internal brewing vessel. Following a robotically conducted cleanse, the internal vessel is ready to brew another cup according to the instructions of the next customer.
Internet of Things (IoT) technology plays a pivotal role in keeping the bots running. Let’s say, for example, bot X located at the Maersk Global Service Centre (a data and computer processing center that Chai Point serves) in their Pune branch will in, a certain number of cups, run out of ginger. IoT technology will relay this via cloud computing to Chai Point’s command center. That information is near instantaneously relayed to their local supplier, who will arrive at the location of the Brewing Bot to refill it before it runs empty. In this way, the bot’s capacity to make a steaming brew for the customer is ceaseless—and their replenishing process is seamless. Employees patronizing Chai Point will have few complaints, if any.
The remote bots are especially useful in hospitals because the lack of human interaction reduces the possibility of a pathogen being passed on to a customer who buys a cup of tea. With cashless payment, nobody needs to handle bacteria-laden currency notes – it’s all done in a totally sanitary fashion.
Using AWS Machine Learning models, Chai Point analyzes various factors including: customer preferences to personalize beverage options and past consumption data to enhance the future user experience. This enables implementation of real-time adjustments, allowing customers to customize sweetness, strength, and milk levels so that, increasingly, Chai Point will be able to brew each customer’s preference or “My Chai” as they call it.
While many older customers still prefer their chaiwallahs, millennials and gen Z have taken to the new technology like ducks to water comprising a whopping 63% of their customers.
Bijral considers Chai Point to be not only an F&B company focused on tea, but also an automated beverage platform, which can be marketed and sold to other companies for their beverage needs. In doing so, the company hopes to reset industry standards, ensuring unmatched consistency while tailoring to customer tastes.
Already, after experiencing Chai Point at Kumbh, a man from Texas made an inquiry on who he had to connect with to import the machine to his locality to serve beverages at his business. The inquiry is promising for Chai Point, which had, until then, been focused only on domestic expansion. Almost before they’re ready for it, they may have to become a global supplier of Brewing Bots. It’s problem that Bijral welcomes.
While companies like Tesla are investing in AI and robotics to produce all-purpose robots like the Tesla Optimus, smaller companies like Chai Point have leveraged the availability of such technologies to enhance automation in such a fashion that human error will soon be a thing of the past. One won’t get a cold or poorly prepared cup of chai or green tea due to the precision of the automation involved.
Whether it’s brewing tea, self-driving cars, or the promise of a robotic housekeeper, it appears increasingly that big tech with small tech companies like Chai Point is bringing society closer to the world of the Jetsons. I’m just waiting for my flying car with a vehicular Brew Bot installed underneath my cupholder!
Still, as successful as they’ve been doing it, it’s not Chai Point’s ultimate ambition to serve tea whatever the speed, efficiency, and excellence they’ve managed to deliver to consumers; their goal is to shape the future of the retail beverage industry in India, and perhaps the world. Their slogan is “India Runs on Chai.” Perhaps the entire beverage industry will one day run on their platform.
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