Domino’s India cafe experiment to lure customers during off-peak hours

Its biggest challenge is making coffee a habitual purchase at a pizza chain.

Jubilant FoodWorks Limited, the operator of Domino's Pizza in India, has launched a café concept inside one of its restaurants, as it looks to capture off-peak demand and tap into India’s fast-growing café market.

Called Cafe Domino’s, the concept was first launched in Advant Business Park, Noida. The cafe serves 100% Arabica coffee starting at $0.51c (INR49) for a cappuccino to $0.82c (INR79) for an iced coffee.

Anuran Dhar, practice head for foodservice, wisdom sectors, and agribusiness at GlobalData plc (GlobalData), said this cafe version aims to offer a relaxed set-up suitable for informal meetings and breaks, an important move for the brand that wants to extend its offering beyond the delivery and takeaway model.

“This is also an indication that the brand wants to capitalise on the Indian café industry, which has grown, driven by young professionals, remote work culture and millennials,” Dhar said in an email interview.

IMARC Services Private Limited (IMARC) published in February 2026 projects that India’s coffee market was valued at $9.53b and will value at $17.31b by 2034, driven by consumer preferences, rising urbanisation, and the proliferation of café culture across metropolitan and tier-two cities.

Suchit Kakar, who was a senior experience strategist at Landor, LLC (Landor) at the time of the interview, told QSR Media in a separate email that he reads this as a tactic to maximise walk-ins during lean hours of the day, which is a challenge some clients have approached them before.

“It makes sense in context. Cafés in India are going increasingly upmarket, so there's a genuine opening for good, affordable places to hang,” Kakar said. If you look at what actually draws people to pizza in India, in our research, the primary motivations cluster around bonding, comfort, and mood upliftment. There's more overlap than it might seem,” Kakar said.

“Though I guess the real test is whether for people, saying 'Wanna go to Domino's for coffee?’ starts feeling like a natural thing to say,” he added.

Julien Bourdiniere, senior partner and head of consumer goods practice Asia at Roland Berger Pte. Ltd., sees this move as structurally advantageous. Bourdiniere noted that India's branded coffee segment has grown at 12.7%, and that the company's existing network of over 2,000 stores across more than 400 cities removes the biggest barrier any new café entrant would face.

"There is an obvious synergy during the day between coffee-drinking occasions and pizza ordering moments, and therefore the opportunity to use the location assets throughout the day and play on the complementarity of the propositions," Bourdiniere said in emailed responses. "That said, this can also be a complexity as the concepts must click and there will be a question of consumer acceptance regarding Domino's as a coffee destination."

The move mirrors a strategy already tested by Yum China Holdings, Inc. First launched as an in-store coffee range at KFC in 2015, the Shanghai-based quick-service restaurant group spun off the KCOFFEE brand as a standalone café concept in 2022. According to the group's financial statement published in April 2026, KCOFFEE cafes are now in over 2,600 locations.

Bourdiniere said Domino’s main challenge is customer experience execution. This means store planning and operations must combine coffee making, pizza cooking, and service. Product consistency and service quality must accommodate these two categories.

Additionally, restaurant staff will be required to be trained in both product categories. Bourdiniere said this will require change management if Domino’s decides to scale the concept.

Bourdiniere said brand acceptance will be the final hurdle, noting that moving an iconic pizza brand into a coffee space where competitors are equally iconic will require careful brand planning.

"This will require careful brand planning to overcome a natural perception gap as a pizza brand," he said. Bourdiniere believes the concept has potential to expand across the region, and even be adopted by other QSR players.

“Again for Cafe Domino’s, the quality of execution and its consistency across the store's network will be the decisive factor,” Bourdiniere said.

$1 = INR95.88