Specialty Coffee Wiki

Subko Coffee

Properties3
descriptionThe Mumbai roastery, bakery and chocolate maker that opened in a Bandra bungalow three days before India's COVID lockdown, buys only Indian-grown Arabica, and has become the most design-visible name in Indian specialty coffee.
tagsorganization, roaster, cafe, bakery, india, mumbai, dubai, specialty-coffee
aliasesSubko, Subko Specialty Coffee Roasters, Subko Specialty Coffee Roasters, Bakehouse and Fine Cacao, Subko Coffee Roasters, Subko Cacao, organizations/subko-coffee

9 min read

Subko Coffee

Subko — full name Subko Specialty Coffee Roasters, Bakehouse and Fine Cacao — is an Indian specialty coffee company based in Mumbai that roasts coffee, bakes bread and pastry, and makes chocolate, and sells all three through its own cafés.12 It opened its first space on 15 March 2020.32

Why it belongs in this wiki: almost every other roaster here buys coffee from origin. Subko is a roaster at origin — an Indian company buying Indian coffee for Indian drinkers, in a country this wiki otherwise describes as an export machine that ships 70–80% of its crop into anonymous European blends (see India). It is also the rare Indian coffee name that the international trade press covers on its own terms rather than as an agricultural statistic.

The company

AttributeDetail
Full nameSubko Specialty Coffee Roasters, Bakehouse and Fine Cacao
HeadquartersMumbai, Maharashtra, India
Opened15 March 2020, Bandra West, Mumbai
Business linesCoffee roasting · bakehouse · fine cacao (chocolate) · cafés · online retail
BuysSpecialty-grade Arabica from Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Meghalaya, in India
CitiesMumbai · Bengaluru · Hyderabad · New Delhi · Dubai
Domainsubko.coffee

The name covers three trades that usually sit in three separate companies. A bakehouse is a working bakery attached to the café rather than a supplier delivering to it, and fine cacao means the company buys cocoa beans and makes chocolate itself — the “bean-to-bar” model, which is the chocolate world’s direct equivalent of a coffee roaster buying green and roasting in-house. Subko runs a separate Instagram identity for the cacao side, @subkocacao, alongside @subkocoffee for the coffee.4

The Bandra opening, and its timing

The first Subko is at Ground Floor, Mary Lodge, 21A Chapel Road, Ranwar, Bandra West, Mumbai 400050.32 It opened on 15 March 2020 — and closed three days later when India went into COVID-19 lockdown, reopening on 8 June 2020.3

That is about as bad a launch window as a café has ever had, and it is worth stating plainly because the company’s later growth into five cities reads very differently once you know the first three days of trading were followed by nearly three months of nothing.

To verify — the 1925 bungalow

A podcast interview with Subko’s founder describes the Bandra West space as a restored 1925 Goan bungalow.4 Chapel Road in Ranwar is a heritage East Indian and Goan Catholic village street, so the description is plausible, but the 1925 date comes from a single spoken interview and no building record, heritage listing or company document was found to confirm it. The claim that the venue was branded “Subko Specialty Coffee Roasters and Bakehouse” at opening is likewise an inference from context, not a sourced fact.

What it buys and how it processes it

This is the part that makes Subko interesting rather than merely well-designed.

Subko told Sprudge that it sources specialty-grade Arabicas from Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Meghalaya in the North-East of India, works on a direct trade basis with producers, targets beans rated 85 points and above from Asian origins, and keeps an in-house Arabica Q Grader to make the quality calls.3

Two of those three states are the obvious ones — Karnataka and Tamil Nadu together grow roughly three quarters of India’s coffee. Meghalaya, in the north-east, is not: it sits far outside the Western Ghats belt that this wiki’s India note describes, and buying from there is a deliberate bet on a frontier growing region rather than a supply decision.

Subko also lists an unusually long menu of experimental fermentation and processing styles it has run on Indian coffee, several of which it says were done for the first time in India:3

ProcessWhat it is
Black Honey, Ivory HoneyHoney process variants — cherry mucilage left on the bean during drying, graded by how much and how dark
Saccharic WashedWashed process with sugar added to the fermentation
Barrel Washed · Single Malt Whiskey Barrel Aged Honey + WashedGreen coffee rested in spirit barrels
Carbonic macerationWhole cherry fermented under CO₂, borrowed from winemaking
Salt FermentationFermentation with salt as the controlling variable
Aqua (Hydro) NaturalsA water-assisted variant on the Natural process
Organic WashedCertified-organic washed lots

Whether or not each “first in India” claim holds, the list itself is the point: it is a roaster deliberately using specialty processing vocabulary to argue that Indian coffee can be a named, lot-level product rather than blend filler. That is the same argument India’s regional coffee GIs make at the state level.

For brewing, the Bandra roastery reported using a Victoria Arduino Mythos II grinder, favouring Kalita and Origami pour-over brewers, and looking at new La Marzocco espresso equipment.3

Where you can drink it

Subko publishes a locations page listing its own outlets plus partner venues that serve its coffee.2 As recorded there:

CityVenueAddress
MumbaiMary Lodge, Bandra WestMary Lodge, 21A Chapel Road, Bandra (W)
BengaluruKoramangalaNo. 68, BBMP PID No. 374, 2-374, 3rd Block, Koramangala, 560034
BengaluruShanti Nagar105, Kengal Hanumanthaiah Rd, Raja Ram Mohanroy Extension, Shanti Nagar, 560027
BengaluruIndiranagar789/A, Ground Floor, HAL 2nd Stage, Appareddipalya, Indiranagar
HyderabadKnowledge City, MadhapurGate 6, Elixir Tower, 4th Floor, Knowledge City Rd, Madhapur
HyderabadRoad No. 36, CBI ColonyGround Floor, Mohan’s Plaza, Rd Number 36, CBI Colony
New DelhiLoCol by Subko, Lodhi ColonyF/6, New Khanna Market, Lodhi Colony, Block D, 110003
New DelhiGully Labs, Panchsheel ParkLocal Shopping Center, 14, Panchsheel Park, 110017
New DelhiSidecar, GK2M29, M Block Market, Greater Kailash-2, 110048
Dubai, UAEAlserkal AvenueWarehouse 15, Al Quoz Industrial First, Al Quoz

Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue is a converted-warehouse arts district in Al Quoz, which is a telling choice of address — it is the same gallery-and-design context Subko occupies in Mumbai, not a mall food court.

To verify — which of these are Subko's own and when each opened

The locations page mixes Subko outlets with partner venues, and the distinction is not cleanly marked. LoCol appears as “LoCol by Subko”, while Gully Labs and Sidecar are separately-named businesses in Delhi listed as dine-in only — most likely partner cafés pouring Subko coffee rather than company-owned sites, but this is not confirmed. Opening hours and dine-in/takeaway formats were only partially legible in the source, and the opening month or year of every outlet except Bandra is unknown — no source consulted gives a site-by-site chronology beyond “after March 2020”. The official locations page returned HTTP 429, rate-limited, on every attempt to re-read it directly for this note.

Recognition

Subko won Outstanding Design Achievement: Vessels at the 2024–25 Sprudge Design Awards, a public-vote award run by the trade publication Sprudge — placing it in a winners’ list otherwise dominated by American and European roasters such as Onyx Coffee Lab, Verve Coffee Roasters and La Cabra. It was the only Indian coffee company among the winners.

Its Bandra roastery was also featured in Sprudge’s Build-Outs of Coffee series in July 2021, the magazine’s long-running photo essay format for new coffee spaces.3

What is not documented

No auction result, hammer price, Cup of Excellence or Best of Panama lot, published cupping score, or Specialty Coffee Association / Coffee Quality Institute record was found under Subko’s name, and no barista or roasting championship placing. The company’s legal entity, ownership structure, roasting volume, staff numbers and revenue are likewise undocumented in anything consulted here.

To verify — who founded Subko

Sprudge names the founders as “Rahul” — surname not given in the article — and Daniel Trulson.3 The podcast interview behind the research report features “Subko’s founder” but the report’s author could not make out the name from the transcript.4 So the wiki has a first name, a full second name, and no corroborating source for either. Do not state a founder’s full name from this note; it needs the company’s own about page, a registry filing, or a bylined interview.

To verify — "85+ points" and "first in India"

Both the SCA 85-and-above sourcing threshold and the claim that several experimental processes were run for the first time ever in the country are Subko describing itself to a magazine.3 Neither is backed by a scoresheet, a Q Grader report, or any Indian industry record, and “first in India” is the kind of claim that is very hard to disprove and rarely audited. Recorded as the company’s position, not as established fact. Note also that this wiki’s India note flags a separate, unrelated “85 to 86 points” claim about Indian coffee from a different source — the two are not evidence for each other.

Footnotes

  1. Subko Specialty Coffee Roasters, Bakehouse and Fine Cacao — LinkedIn company page ↩

  2. Locations — Subko Coffee (official site) ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Build-Outs Of Coffee: Subko Specialty Coffee Roasters & Craft Bakehouse In Mumbai, India — Sprudge, 8 July 2021 — confirmed via WebFetch: the 15 March 2020 opening and three-day COVID closure, the 8 June 2020 reopening, the Mary Lodge address, the founder first names, the Karnataka / Tamil Nadu / Meghalaya sourcing, the in-house Q Grader and 85+ target, the experimental process list, and the bar equipment ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

  4. Putting Indian Coffee on the Map with Subko — video interview ↩ ↩2 ↩3

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