Cafe Coffee Day opens 150th outlet

India's leading coffee-cafe chain Cafe Coffee Day on Tuesday opened its 150th outlet in New Delhi incorporating a bookshop within and announced plans to open 25 more outlets in north India this year.

The company intends to take the number of book-cum-coffee outlets to 25 by 2005 and 100 by 2007 from 10 at present.

CCD has entered into a strategic tie-up with EBD Book Cafe to ensure leisurely browsing and purchase of books over a cup of coffee, the marketing head of the company Sudipta Sen Gupta said.

At the opening of the outlet in Vasant Kunj, she said while the revenue earned from sale of books will go to EBD Book Cafe, the rest will accrue to CCD which is also the investor in the premises for the outlet.

She said the CCD already had nine such book-cum-coffee outlets and planned to open 15 more in one year at Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Jodhpur, Madurai, Mumbai and Udaipur.

The chain plans to take the number of cafes in the National Capital Region to 29 from 18 and another 14 in the rest of north India by the end of 2004, she added.

Sen Gupta said CCD saw a lot of potential in such specialised cafes such as Garden, Fashion, Sport and Music while retaining the standard identity established by CCD.

Many of these cafes will also be equipped with Touch Screen Digital Audio and Video Jukeboxes, she said, adding that the existing outlet in New Friends Colony was also being turned into a book cafe.