Jaipur’s Homegrown Coffee Movement Brewing Beyond The Café

When you walk into Coffee Sutra in Jaipur, it doesn’t immediately try to impress you. Instead, it feels like a space shaped slowly—bit by bit—by someone who has travelled, tasted, and thought deeply about what a cup of coffee can become. The founder, Dushyant Singh, doesn’t hide that everything here came from his own curiosity.

“I am a traveller,” he says simply. “I travel a lot for food. Every year, three–four times I go to different parts of Europe. I learn the food and come back. This is what I have been doing for so many years.”

Coffee Sutra may be only four years old, but the seed for it was planted long before. Dushyant had already built two popular Jaipur restaurants—OTH, launched 13 years ago as a wholesome all-day diner, and Rustic in 2018, born from his belief that Indian cuisine could be flavourful without being heavy or greasy. Coffee entered the picture the same way many ideas do today—quietly, during COVID.

“Actually, the idea came to me just before COVID,” he says. “I could see that coffee was getting bigger. In Scandinavia and all these places, coffee is the most important beverage because they don’t see sunlight for six months. When we were growing up, coffee was just a beverage. Now it’s a luxury.”

Coffee Sutra didn’t begin with a café. It began with beans—with a need to first understand coffee, then roast it, then teach it. The coffee lab came a little later. “The whole idea was to make something where people can come and see how we do the dry processing in coffee,” Dushyant says. “Many people come and learn about coffee with us.”

He mentions certification programmes they will soon start, led by his team that includes a Q-grader trained under the Coffee Board of India. “People don’t realise how much science is behind a cup,” he laughs.

Dushyant doesn’t use the word ‘brand’ casually. For him, Coffee Sutra is more like a system—a circle where beans, cafes, training, and equipment all connect. “Coffee Sutra is a 360-degree coffee company. We started off as a bean company. Because we had our own restaurants, we started serving our coffee there—without telling anyone. People really liked it. After six months, we launched Coffee Sutra,” he reveals.

The cafés came later—not as an expansion strategy but as an experiment space. A place where people could drink the beans, understand processes, and even buy them for their own cafés. Today, Coffee Sutra works across four verticals—B2B beans, online retail, cafes, and machine rentals. The last one is particularly interesting. “All the hotels in the world rent their coffee machines. Not because they can’t buy them, but because they don’t want the hassle of maintaining them. They pay rent and buy beans at a certain price. That’s how we make money—through rentals and beans.”

At some point, Dushyant leans into the broader story of coffee’s evolution. Decoding the much talked about coffee wave, Dushyant says, “If I break it down simply: the first wave was when coffee was just a beverage—you enjoyed the drink. The second wave was when people started noticing the difference between good and bad coffee. Instant coffee versus powdered coffee, all of that. Then came the third wave, where everyone suddenly cared about how the coffee was processed—washed, honey, natural, sun-dried. The fourth wave shifted the conversation to sustainability and certifications. Hotels started asking not just for beans, but for proof of ethical practices. And now, the fifth wave is all about scalability. Technology and AI are pushing things further—coffee isn’t just a drink anymore, it’s a full-blown industry.” He recalls visiting Milan, where he saw a fully robotic café—no human intervention, not even for latte art.

But then he pauses. “Is that a good thing? I don’t know,” he admits. “When you go to a cafe and someone knows exactly how your coffee should be served and that’s what we are going to miss. It’s all about the human touch.”

He remembers the 90s beaten coffee at home. “My mom used to beat it first, then I used to hold the cup; it was like a joint effort,” he says and contrasts it with how today’s customers ask for single origin beans and processing methods. “We should give credit to brands like Café Coffee Day and Barista. If they hadn’t come, maybe Starbucks wouldn’t have come, and maybe we wouldn’t be here either.”

Every harvest season, the Coffee Sutra team heads to Chikmagalur in Karnataka, where 70% of India’s coffee grows. He explains how global events—even a fire in Brazil—can triple the price of coffee in India. But he’s also proud of how India is pushing forward. “We are the 8th largest producer of coffee in the world. A lot of good things are happening.”

On quality, he stays honest: Indian coffee is improving every year, but the world still looks to Africa and South America for the best beans, often because of their volcanic soil. Coffee Sutra is still Jaipur-focused, but not by limitation. Talking about coffee culture in the pink city, he says, “Tier-2 cities have huge potential now. Rents are lower, aspirations are higher. Jaipur’s per-capita coffee drinking is better than Delhi and Mumbai.” Talking about his future venture, Dushyant says, Ahmedabad is next. A collaborative project in Delhi is also in the works.

The interesting piece is a new service vertical inspired by Italy: cafés can outsource their entire beverage section to Coffee Sutra. “We take care of the machinery, baristas, everything. For someone new to the business, managing beverages is the toughest part. We take that burden,” he explains.

For all the talk about beans, processing, and machines, Dushyant keeps returning to people—his team of 300, the farmers, the café crowd that keeps learning faster than he expected.

Even the strange charm of global coffee cultures—like civet coffee ((Kopi luwak) in Bali or egg coffee in Vietnam—finds space in his memories. He tells them with humour, as if coffee is never just coffee but a story of how people adapt, experiment, and discover.

He ends with a story from 950 AD, about a shepherd whose goats ate coffee berries and suddenly burst with energy. “That is the actual Red Bull,” he smiles. And then casually adds, “Do you know which empire made coffee famous? Ottoman Empire.”

Coffee Sutra, in that sense, fits right into this timeline. A Jaipur café that began with travel, turned into a lab, grew into a bean company, and today sits somewhere between tradition and the fifth wave—where human hands still matter, but curiosity leads the way.