SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — Gaurav Chawla has spent the last two-and-a-half years of his life dedicated to one thing: Brewing the perfect cup of masala chai.
He quit his plush Silicon Valley job at Salesforce in 2013, and the 39-year-old began designing a machine that can dispense freshly-made tea in under three minutes. His hard work has paid off, and now the machine is ready.
Named Chime, the machine costs $250 and uses fresh tea pods that cost only a dollar each. The pods are infused with strands of ginger and other spices. They are released into the tea brewing chamber, while the milk simmers below. Once the tea is brewed, it’s released into the hot milk below and dispensed into a cup.
Chawla encountered many bumps in the road early in the design process — his first attempt resulted in a $5,000 coffee machine. “I thought I could replace coffee with tea leaves. I was wrong,” said Chawla.
After the first prototype was successfully produced, it took Chawla another year-and-a-half of research and further development to finally complete Chime.
“What we did is basically replicate the entire tea-making process on the stove and automated it,” he said.
Chime machines are currently being manufactured in China, and Chawla has already begun taking pre-orders. His future plans also include meeting with potential investors to expand the business outside of the San Francisco network, where he is currently based.
Around the globe, tea is the No. 2 most widely consumed beverage after water. In India, entrepreneurs are discovering a new passion for chai through cafes such as Chaayos and Chai-Point. American cafe giant Starbucks itself purchased specialty tea retailer Teavana for an estimated $620 million in 2012.
Chawla, however, wants to bring authentic tea to a non-diaspora population.
“The coffee shop kind of chai latte,” he put it bluntly, “is not a benchmark of how one should drink tea.”
