Blender Boom

Neeti Chopra - New Delhi

Benneta Hospitality, one of India's leading bar and cafe facility sales and designing organisation handling the marketing and distribution of Blendtec products (commercial blender division of K-TEC) in India, is aggressively promoting its range of Blendtec blenders.

The three tabletop blenders introduced for commercial applications are The Blendtec Smoother, the Blendtec SpaceSaver and the Xpress Blender. "Given that the blended drink market is fast developing in India, this segment has seen many changes. Smoothies and frozen coffees are the latest products to create their own niche. Blendtec has joined with major retailers as well as local operations to provide customers with a unique and high quality blended taste," said Byron Thueson, vice-president, sales and marketing, Blendtec.

The company is optimistic about selling at least 1000 blenders by the end of this year. "In India we are targeting primarily coffee chains that are fast churning out a number of smoothie options. The company has already identified some of the clients namely, Café Coffee Day, Barista, Tropical Smoothies, Passion-My Cup of tea and Costa Coffee. Vikram Medirata, director and owner, Benneta Hospitality points out "We are looking primarily at all metro cities as there is lot of awareness due to westernisation and makes perfect sense to start here."

Medirata believes that India will become one of the largest blended drinks market fuelled by the coffee chains that are now promoting a host of frozen and blended coffees as variants of the standard coffee that was available initially. As far as manufacturing blenders in India is concerned, he explained, "The market size for these products in India is still quite small, while manufacturing these domestically requires high investment. Hence, it is cost-effective to source some of the products from outside India." Next on the list after the Indian market, Blendtec has plans to tap the south and central American markets.