Ketan Desai Email and Phone Number

Also known as the 'baldmanoftea', Ketan now shares is vast and varied 35 years’ experience in tea by mentoring, advising and hand-holding tea and beverage brands with ideas, insights and implementation spanning product to procurement and innovations to infusions. Till April 2024, Ketan was the Chief Tea Officer at VAHDAM. A seasoned tea-taster and blender, Ketan headed tea buying and strategic procurement partnerships. He also guided NPD in developing innovative herbal infusions and tisanes. He drove ESG and Sustainability, and scaled TEACH ME - the flagship CSR programme - to benefit 14,000 children in tea-estates. Ketan represented VAHDAM across government and industry fora.After a brief stint with the family tea business, Ketan went on to work with some of the top tea planters, tasters, blenders and marketers in major tea producing and consuming countries across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Russia, CIS, Continental Europe and WANA region. He started by learning about tea plantation and manufacture at various tea estates in North India before being promoted to Calcutta to work in international marketing. In the 1990s, he led bulk exports to Russia, Poland, Iran, Germany and the UK.During the first dotcom boom in 2000, he was instrumental in starting www.teauction.com - world's first B2B portal for auctioning of tea - using digital platform. After successful launch in India, he introduced www.teauction.com in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Bangladesh. In 2007, he started CHA - India's first chain of loose-leaf tea boutiques. An MBA in Strategy from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Ketan is a keen and avid reader. His favourite authors include the three bards - Shakespeare, Tagore and Burns, besides Salman Rushdie, Amartya Sen and Aleksander Pushkin. Ketan shuttles between Mumbai and Kolkata - the city of Nobel laureates Rabindranath Tagore, Saint Teresa, Amartya Sen and countless other luminaries - and the city of his birth.