Madhuri and Srinivas Ganadinni, a Hyderabad-based entrepreneur couple, want to change the way Indians consume their cuppa. Through a D2C venture and B2B collaborations, The Tea Planet offers a selection of over 200 tea products. India is a tea-drinking country. People are also venturing beyond the boiled milk chai to try green, oolong, black, and even bubble tea in a variety of flavors.
The country, which ranks second only to China in world tea production, savors its tea, consuming 80 percent of all tea produced. As per Expert Market Research, the country consumed ten million tonnes of tea in 2020.
Srinivas Ganadinni got his start in the tea business in New York in 2007. He met Mark Goonasekera from Sri Lanka while working part-time as a technical recruiter and soft skills instructor at a consulting company as an MBA student, and they began a Ceylon tea firm in the US before Srinivas moved to India.
Following his marriage to Madhuri Ganadinni, he continues with the tea exporting company and then founded The Tea Planet, a direct-to-customer e-commerce platform, in 2016.
The Hyderabad-based entrepreneurs, who have been in the tea industry for at least a decade, testify to the opportunities for growth that have arisen as a result of fast digitization.
What does The Tea Planet do?
Starting with a small location in Hyderabad, the company has developed over the years to be an end-to-end solutions provider in India's specialty tea market.
In addition to exporting and importing coffee and tea from India and Sri Lanka, The Tea Planet formulates various tea mixtures, manufactures a variety of tea products, as well as appears to work on research and product development of different ingredients, packing material, and modifying government rules and regulations, especially about the tea industry.
Madhuri claims that her company is India's only manufacturer of bubble tea products. It also uses a franchising model to open The Tea Planet kiosks or cafes while providing consulting and product development process services to 40-plus businesses across the country. The tea products are also accessible on marketplaces such as Flipkart and Amazon, in addition to retailing via franchisees.
Apart from this, there is also a very interesting success story of a couple who make 2 lakh per month from tableware created from arecanut leaf.
