While you are busy enjoying your cup of Dalgona coffee at home, your favourite local cafe could be on the verge of shutting down! To make sure cafes and roasteries don’t run dry in the post-COVID world, Indian Coffee Culture has started #cupofjoy to help these businesses and YOU could be a part of it!
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Why are cafes shutting down?
The COVID-19 pandemic has several small businesses struggling to keep up with rents, electricity costs, etc., during the lockdown. No people on the roads means no business for cafes.
Many cafe owners have taken out loans to start their business. Most are struggling to keep up with the EMIs and operational costs. To help these local coffee houses stay afloat, Indian Coffee Culture started #CupofJoy – a non-profit initiative that lets you buy coupons/online vouchers from your favorite cafe and redeem it any time after the lockdown!
How Indian Coffee Culture is saving local cafes with #CupofJoy
IndianCoffeeCulture.com is a hub for all coffee connoisseurs or enthusiasts looking to take their love for coffee to the next level. It started as an Instagram coffee review page in 2017. Today it offers coffee consulting, evaluation, coffee brewing training, events, and even retails premium coffee.
Run by Paul, Indian Coffee Culture is a true promoter of love for coffee. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, they put their heads together to help struggling local cafes keep up with utility costs, barista salaries, and other expenses.
“We started working on this idea 3 days after the lockdown was announced.
A lot of our customers who were small cafes and restaurants were not going on with their regular business due to lockdown and hence we going in to a loss. Our sales too sales plummeted to ZERO.
Most of them were in business due to the passion they had for coffee and had used their life savings to start these projects.” – Suhas told us in a conversation.
The idea became a thriving topic on Twitter:
Just came across this brilliant idea by @Benkicoffee and @ICoffeeculture (members of @India_CBC) which can be replicated for all industries hit by #COVID2019 @sampad can we enable this through @instamojo ?
It’s such a great gifting idea too that can help businesses tide over pic.twitter.com/kQVfStKxxQ
— Brat@Home 🇮🇳 (@D_Brat) March 25, 2020
How to contribute to #cupofjoy
The #CupofJoy initiative currently has 10+ listed cafes and roasteries from all around India. You can pick any of these cafes and buy/donate their products from their Instamojo stores.
Just head over to the #cupofjoy section on the IndiaCoffeeculture website and click on any of the cafes to donate or buy a coupon.
Buy now, redeem later!
You can buy coffee vouchers, meal coupons, coffee filters, and even coffee beans from the online stores of the above-listed cafes. The vouchers start from as low as ₹.140 and go up to ₹10,000.
You can also choose to just donate to these cafes if you’re not in the same geographical region. This way you can help support small businesses pull through the tough times.
Calling all cafes to join #cupofjoy
If you are a struggling cafe business, just follow these steps to be a part of Indian Coffee Culture’s #CupofJoy.
Fast-tracking the donation set-up
Speaking to us about setting up the entire #Cupofjoy campaign, Suhas explained how they needed a platform that could help them execute this swiftly.
“I found out about Instamojo through a friend who had used it before to sell some products. Selling products [physical and digital] and selling tickets/events are some great features that we could use at this time.” – Suhas told us.
The ease of setup and the response time the INSTAMOJO team has is unparallel to any other service in India.
Supporting small businesses
At Instamojo, we support a million+ small businesses in India that have taken a hit due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s why we take extra care to get businesses up and running.
To help offline businesses connect to their online customers during the lockdown, we have introduced a faster KYC process and a special coupon code for free transactions.
