Review of 'Coffee King: The Swift Rise and Sudden Death of Café Coffee Day Founder V.G. Siddhartha', a new book by Rukmini Rao and Prosenjit Datta.
Mohan Gulrajani
Book review: The tragedy of Cafe Coffee Day, a global brand that might have been
Rukmini Rao and Prosenjit Datta's ‘Coffee King’ is a nuanced portrait of Cafe Coffee Day founder V.G. Siddhartha, and a sharp indictment of institutional failure
CCD was among the first Indian brands to recognise that a cafe wasn't merely a place for coffee buffs.
On 29 July 2019, V.G. Siddhartha, founder of the Cafe Coffee Day chain and other businesses, jumped off a bridge into the swirling waters of the Netravati River in Mangaluru. It was a tragic end to a life that had promised so much.
While the question of what finally prompted the mild-mannered man to take such an extreme step remains unanswered, some clues on the factors that led to it are available in Coffee King: The Swift Rise and Sudden Death of Café Coffee Day Founder V.G. Siddhartha, a new book by Rukmini Rao and Prosenjit Datta. That despite a five-year-long research exercise, the authors, seasoned journalists both, fail to uncover where the money trail ended, reflecting the complex web of business entities that formed his empire, the key to which may have been lost with the man’s death.
Coffee King is not just the story of Siddhartha’s rise and fall, but an investigation into a puzzle that lay hidden in plain sight: how did a business so lauded, so visible and seemingly successful sustain for so long on numbers that never added up? Siddhartha’s death was a human tragedy, but it also exposed a house of cards built on opaque finances, mounting debt and shifting obligations. Its collapse sent shock waves beyond the coffee business.
Among its collateral casualties was Mindtree, one of India’s most promising IT firms, in which Siddhartha was the largest shareholder. Forced into a distress sale of his stake to L&T, he inadvertently facilitated a hostile takeover that Mindtree’s founders had fought fiercely. In tracing how such a sprawling facade endured for such a long time, Rao and Datta offer both a biography and an anatomy of a prolonged deception.
There’s no question that in its prime, Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) was transformative. It was among the first Indian brands to recognise that a cafe was not merely a place for coffee buffs. It was a popular and comfortable haunt where students, office-goers and young people met, lingered and often created communities. This “third place” idea helped shape urban Indian life in the early 2000s. Yet, the lingering feeling from the book is not one of nostalgia but of regret, because CCD was India’s closest brush with a global coffeehouse identity and in its self-destruction, it squandered that vision.
The roots of CCD’s collapse lie not in a lack of ambition but in flawed execution. The authors dissect the company’s operational anatomy with clinical precision, taking the reader through the world of plantations, procurement, roasting, retail, kiosks, vending and logistics. The company’s sprawl was vast, and so were the fault lines. Debt mounted relentlessly even as multiple entities set up by Siddhartha were laced together with opaque, cross-pledged obligations such that their financial reporting became an exercise in deferral.
Siddhartha’s suicide note claimed the group’s assets exceeded its liabilities, which was simply not true because by then, the operation was running on empty. “Siddhartha may have made some money when he was starting out with Sivan Securities and through his coffee exports business. But soon after starting the cafe chain, he was increasingly dependent on raising funds to run and expand his empire,” the book notes with devastating understatement.
That tone holds throughout with the authors refusing to sensationalise, focusing instead on laying bare what the numbers were saying all along, but most people, including lenders, refused to pay heed. In doing so, they missed the culture of deference, lax governance and systemic evasion wherein glaring institutional weakness was compounded by personal misjudgement as auditors signed off on accounts without probing basic inconsistencies while board members rubber-stamped decisions.
Even later, after the debts and mismanagement came to light, much of the media overstated the turnaround attributed to Siddhartha’s widow Malavika Hegde. They overlooked the deeper structural issues that predated her involvement. As the book shows, all roads led back to Siddhartha. “Everyone reported only to Siddhartha… There were no formal processes in place; no approval chains, no record-keeping systems, no software to track activities or explain decisions. Everything began and ended with him.” The portrait is of a charismatic founder whose empire depended on him completely and was therefore doomed to disaster when he faltered.
The consequences are visible in the numbers. In FY2019, CCD operated 1,752 stores in India. As of 31 March 2025, the count had shrunk to 422, a collapse of more than 75%. Even after selling off several key assets, the group’s debt remains heavy at ₹1,273 crore. The nationwide cafe network that once defined youth culture is today a hollow edifice.
The irony, rendered sharper by hindsight, lies in CCD’s contrast with Starbucks, the global giant increasingly setting the tone for India’s cafe market. Starbucks today operates more than 40,000 stores across nearly 90 markets, a journey that began in 1971 with a small shop in Seattle, US, selling beans and tea.
Guided by Howard Schultz, the chain grew through disciplined investment, professional management, a tight focus on the core business, and governance structures that prized accountability. Over five decades, these principles produced the world’s most recognisable coffee brand. The divergence from CCD’s path could not be starker or more instructive. In the book Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul, Schultz writes about “growing with discipline” and “balancing intuition with rigor.” Reflecting on Starbucks’ own brush with overexpansion, Schultz says growth had become a “carcinogen,” masking structural weaknesses. Nor is Starbucks the only one of its kind.
Around the time that Siddhartha was starting CCD, in the UK, Gerry Ford set up Caffe Nero. The chain grew steadily with Ford keeping a sharp focus on coffee and reinvesting profits into expanding cafes rather than diversifying into unrelated ventures. Today, Caffe Nero operates 1,150 stores in 11 countries, with roughly 625 outlets in the UK, and reported sales of around £626 million for FY25 with an EBITDA of about $63 million.
By contrast, under Siddhartha, CCD diversified before consolidating, expanded before stabilising, and borrowed before earning. Its story is one of ambition unaccompanied by structure and its collapse emblematic of a wider pattern in Indian entrepreneurship. Founders with bold, credible visions—in education, aviation, retail or technology—have stumbled not because their ideas lacked merit but because governance collapsed beneath them. At companies like Byju’s and Kingfisher, transparency gave way to opacity while financial discipline was given short shrift. The sad result: ideas that could have travelled globally were undone by failures entirely of their own making. In this sense, Coffee King transcends biography and becomes a mirror held up to Indian business—a reminder of the fate of a potentially great startup when it is not accompanied by rigour and honesty.
In the book, Siddhartha is not vilified, nor is he romanticised. He appears as a brilliant, restless figure whose empire rested on foundations too fragile to endure. The systemic failures of unchecked debt, weak boards, indulgent auditors and a founder-centric culture were as responsible as his personal missteps.
Closing the book, the reader is left with a deep sense of loss not only for Siddhartha gone too soon, but for the global brand that might have been. CCD was one of India’s most promising attempts at a homegrown coffee brand capable of international reach. Instead, what remains is a cautionary tale of a dream undone from within.
Sundeep Khanna is a regular Mint columnist and author of business books.
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
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