Blue Tokai hires chief business officer for 800-store expansion plan

Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters has hired Pranav Dahiya as chief business officer, and the move says as much about the brand’s ambitions as the title does. The specialty coffee chain is now chasing 800 stores globally by 2028, a scale that would push it far beyond the niche-roaster playbook and into the brutal logistics of running a mass-market café business without losing its identity.

Dahiya arrives with exactly the kind of résumé that signals a more hard-nosed phase. He was chief financial and strategy officer at Pizza Hut India, served on the board of Yum! India, and previously held leadership roles at Chaayos and Hero FinCorp. His time at Chaayos, about four years, and his stint at Pizza Hut, about a year and two months, point to experience in both Indian café growth and QSR-style operating discipline, the two skill sets Blue Tokai is likely betting on as it stretches its footprint.

The expansion target is already aggressive. Blue Tokai has said it wants 800 stores globally by 2028, after an earlier plan framed the same goal for the end of 2027. That pace would more than quadruple its network in a short window, and it comes after the company added Rs 175 crore, or about $19 million, in an extension of its Series D round. Total investment in the company has now crossed $130 million.

Blue Tokai’s current base gives that ambition some context. By March 2026, it had 228 cafés across India. In August 2025, the chain said it had more than 155 outlets across eight Indian states and Japan. The brand crossed the 100-outlet mark in 2023 and opened its 200th café in India about six months before the March 2026 tally, a sign of how quickly it has moved from cult specialty name to one of the country’s biggest café footprints.

The numbers on the business side have moved too. Revenue in FY25 reached about Rs 325 crore, up from Rs 216 crore in FY24, while net loss narrowed to about Rs 50.2 crore from Rs 62.9 crore. Founded in 2013 by Matt Chitharanjan and Namrata Asthana, with Shivam Shahi later joining as COO, Blue Tokai built its reputation on direct sourcing from coffee estates, careful roasting and making better coffee more accessible through cafés and online sales.

That is the tension now hanging over the Dahiya hire. Blue Tokai is no longer acting like a small specialty roaster with a few standout cafés. It is behaving like a company that wants to be both an ambassador for Indian coffee culture and a chain that can execute at scale, and the next phase will depend on whether it can keep those two instincts in balance.