Ahmedabad-headquartered Wagh Bakri Tea Group will set up a new plant in Gujarat with an investment of over Rs 100 crore to increase its raw material storage capacity and instant tea output, CEO Sanjay Singal said.
The new unit, which will come up at Dakor in Gujarat, will be ready by the third quarter of 2025. With the move, the Ahmedabad-based company intends to expand its instant tea and raw material warehouse capacities, he added. According to Singal, who joined Wagh Bakri as its CEO in August last year, the new warehouse will be equipped with automatic stock retrieval system. The computer-controlled system automatically places and retrieves loads from defined storage locations.
“We are setting up a new manufacturing unit to basically meet our expanded demand, especially in the instant tea category, because convenience is a new driver for our consumers, and for that we are setting up additional capacity,” he said. The new unit will increase the instant tea production capacity of the company by five times. “With the new instant tea line, this will grow up to 20,000 packets per day,” Singal said. Currently, it produces 3,000–4,000 instant tea packets daily. As a result, the storage capacity of the Gujarat Tea Processors and Packers Ltd. brand will increase by 50% to about 15–18 lakh chests, with each accommodating 14–20 kg, he added.
Even as the company continues to launch new products every month and open new tea lounges in different cities, it also plans to increase its focus on e-commerce, quick commerce, digitisation, artificial intelligence in manufacturing and big data, Singhal said. “We started in 2023–24 with around 34 tea lounges, and added 20 this year. We plan to add a couple of stores every quarter,” he said.
However, while asserting that the company is not aiming for “crazy expansion of tea lounges”, Singhal added that “this business is an integral part of our vision for the tea category, so we would like to expand where we can give good experience and make tea interesting, exciting for consumers”. Even when India’s tea production dropped 8–12% compared
