In 2008, VG Siddhartha brought in Alok Gupta, another UB Group veteran, as the CEO of Café Coffee Day. Gupta recalled that a popular joke at the time was that if a UB employee wanted to quit, all they had to do was cross the road to find their next job.

The same year, Siddhartha also brought in Bidisha Nagaraj as the president of marketing. Nagaraj had largely worked with technology companies, including Google, Intel and Compaq, till then, though she had started her career as an account director with the advertisement behemoth MullenLowe Lintas.

CCD was no longer a scrappy start-up operation. It had a pan-India presence, but it faced competition from newcomers. Regulatory changes like a ban on smoking in public were also changing the way restaurants, pubs, bars and cafes operated.

The s

See Full Page