The Successful Journey: How Keith Tan Started His Coffee Business

At times, taking a decision to leave a comfortable spot to go set up your own path can be staggering. Many people have attempted this and have fizzled. Others have also been effective with the assistance of business advisors.

For Keith Tan, a former wealth manager, he surrendered the monotonous routine in 2015 to launch his own chain of cafés (coffee shops) – and it has been very successful. Keith Tan needed to quit his envious financial position as the CEO to begin his own chain of bistros.

Ella is an independent robot espresso business. Ella is a multimillion-dollar outfit generating heaps of money for the 41-year-old Keith Tan.

Tan was just 35 when he considered starting something for himself in the beverage business. As the organization was growing, the founder and CEO of Crown Digital considered adding technology to it, to make it more appealing to customers.

With this idea, Crown Digital was conceived: which pointed toward tending to the challenges inside the Food and Beverage (F&B) sector.

Ella is the organization’s first product — an automated robot intended to recreate crafted by a human coffee server.

Made in 2018 following quite a while of experimentation, the mechanical barista features an independent arm, delivered by advanced mechanics organization Techman Robot, which sits inside a five square meter, straightforward stand.

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The machine works nonstop and can serve up to 200 cups of coffee each hour — four times the number of as a regular human barista.

Its ingredients — fresh milk and beans — only need to be topped up after 360 servings, which is done by delivery drivers monitoring Ella via an app. Crown Digital’s in-house command center allows Ella to detect and resolve spillages or machine faults remotely.

According to Tan, the technology is planned explicitly for high thickness, in and out conditions like air terminals, transport centers and workplaces, where speed is vital.

He said, sometimes you only need speed, consistency and simplicity of requesting, and that is where advanced mechanics can truly come in. Motivation behind why the digitization came in.

That efficiency means cost savings can be passed on to consumers too. For instance, a latte by Ella costs about $3, while a typical barista coffee in Singapore costs around $4.50.

But Ella isn’t the only coffee robot around. There are others like YuMi, which was engineered by Swiss firm ABB, a versatile robot capable of executing various tasks, Cafe X in San Francisco, Beat at South Korea’s Incheon Airport and so on.

Ella’s coffee is accessible to shoppers at transport center points in Japan and Singapore.Crown Digital.

Crown Digital has since signed deals to roll out its robot baristas at selected stops on the East Japan Railway Company’s network of 1,657 stations, and at 30 subway stations in Singapore operated by SMRT.

Meanwhile, Keith Tan says they’re starting off with coffee, but are not ending with that. Ella’s going to go on to do food, for excellent deliveries. And there are going to be many different verticals where Ella could be deployed.