An EV Company Wants to Sell You Filter Coffee And It Just Hired Shruti Haasan to Make You Believe It

Here's a sentence nobody had on their 2026 bingo card: a conglomerate best known for electric scooter rentals has signed two Bollywood actors to sell South Indian filter coffee nationwide. Adhira & Appa Coffee, the café chain under EBG Group (the parent entity behind eBikeGo), has appointed Shruti Haasan and Murali Sharma as brand ambassadors as it races toward a wildly ambitious 400-outlet target by 2027. The brand is currently in roughly 9 cities. The parent company did ₹5.11 crore in revenue in FY24. And they're publicly benchmarking themselves against Starbucks and Third Wave Coffee Roasters.

Let's talk about what's actually happening here because this is either visionary or delusional, and the line between the two is thinner than a filter coffee decoction.

The Strategy Breakdown: What's Smart and What's Suspect

The celebrity picks are actually logical.

Credit where it's due the casting makes sense on paper. Shruti Haasan is a rare dual-market asset: she carries genuine pull in South Indian markets (Tamil and Telugu cinema) while maintaining mainstream Bollywood recognition. For a brand trying to take South Indian filter coffee national, she's a cultural translator. She bridges Chennai credibility with Mumbai awareness. That's a real strategic function.

Murali Sharma is the deeper cut. He's not a celebrity endorser in the traditional sense — he's a prolific character actor with enormous face recognition across South Indian and Hindi cinema. He reads as authentic, paternal, and rooted — which maps perfectly onto a brand called "Appa" (literally "father" in Tamil/Telugu). The pairing creates a generational bracket: Shruti for the Instagram-scrolling, specialty-coffee-curious 25-year-old; Murali for the cultural trust signal that says this is real South Indian coffee, not a startup cosplaying as one.

The "heritage-first" positioning is smart — but the execution is confused.

Adhira & Appa is trying to carve a niche as the "authentic alternative to global chains" — COO Karan Mendon explicitly named Starbucks and Third Wave as competitors. The menu backs this up: dosa tacos, medu vada waffles, filter coffee tiramisu a fusion menu blending Western formats with South Indian foundations. That's a legitimate whitespace. Third Wave sells specialty pour-overs. Starbucks sells lifestyle. Nobody owns "South Indian filter coffee as a national café experience" at scale.

But here's where it gets shaky: calling yourself a heritage brand while being owned by an electric vehicle rental company is a credibility paradox. EBG Group (Think Ebikego Pvt. Ltd.) generated ₹5.11 crore in revenue in FY24 with 17 employees. That's the corporate backbone behind a café chain promising 400 outlets. The diversification ambition is staggering EBG Group spans mobility, technology, realty, lifestyle, health, food, services, and education but diversification without depth is a red flag in consumer-facing businesses, especially food and beverage.

The 400-outlet target needs a reality check.

Adhira & Appa is currently present in Kochi, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Pune, Dehradun, Indore, Chandigarh, Nashik, and Bengaluru, and plans to scale to 400 outlets across metro and Tier-2 cities by 2027. That's going from roughly 9 cities to 400 stores in under two years. For context, Third Wave Coffee — which has been operational since 2016, raised $35M+ in funding, and is considered one of India's fastest-scaling café brands — has around 450-500 outlets after nearly a decade.

Adhira & Appa is running a franchise-led expansion model (consistent with EBG Group's FOCO playbook from eBikeGo), which explains the velocity aspiration. But franchise-led café scaling in India is littered with casualties. The economics of filter coffee — lower ticket size than espresso-based drinks, regional taste preferences, freshness demands — make rapid franchise scaling harder than it looks.

Celebrity spend before product-market fit is a gamble.

This is the core tension. Signing two brand ambassadors is a demand-generation play. But Adhira & Appa hasn't yet proven it can consistently deliver on unit economics across geographies. The brand is spending on top-of-funnel awareness (celebrities, PR, expansion announcements) before it has demonstrated bottom-of-funnel proof (same-store sales growth, franchise profitability, repeat customer rates).

Why This Matters

For the Indian café market: This signals that South Indian filter coffee is being treated as a legitimate national café category, not just a regional beverage or a menu add-on at existing chains. If Adhira & Appa gains traction, expect copycat positioning from larger players.

For celebrity marketing in F&B: Shruti Haasan and Murali Sharma aren't A-list tier by endorsement fees, which means this is a high-efficiency celebrity play maximum cultural signal at manageable cost. Emerging F&B brands should study this pairing model: one for reach, one for trust.

For EBG Group: This is a credibility test. The group is asking the market to believe that a company built on EV rentals can simultaneously build a national café chain. That's not impossible — Tata runs everything from cars to coffee — but Tata had decades and billions to earn that conglomerate trust.

Strategic Prediction

Adhira & Appa will not hit 400 outlets by 2027. The franchise pipeline may look strong on paper, but café franchise mortality rates in India suggest a more realistic landing zone of 100–150 operational outlets if execution is disciplined. The brand's survival depends on whether it can build a repeat-purchase habit around filter coffee in non-South-Indian markets — and that's a product and pricing problem, not a celebrity problem.

What will determine success: if Adhira & Appa can become the default answer to "Where do I get good filter coffee?" in Tier 2 cities where South Indian cafés don't exist, they've won a real niche. Shruti and Murali can open the door. But only the coffee can keep people coming back.

Bold bet. Interesting casting. Shaky foundations. This one needs watching.