First crack
Some of the coffee the world called exceptional came from the hills he grew up beside. That was the awakening.
Ajai trained as an engineer in Kerala and built a career with multinationals that carried him through Europe and then to the UAE, where he has now spent close to seventeen years.
Coffee arrived through that work. European coffee culture showed him what a cup could be treated as — a craft, a tradition, an origin worth naming. Then came the detail that reorganised everything: the beans behind some of that high-end Italian coffee were grown in the Western Ghats of Wayanad.
He was sitting on black gold. He named the company for the mountains that grew it — Western Ghats Mountain Coffee — and began building the route in the opposite direction.
Coffee has a life. The ecosystem should be beneficial for everyone in it.Ajai Ravi
What followed wasn't a product line. It was a chain — sourcing, processing, roasting, packaging, retail, education, machines, farm visits and export — built link by link, from two countries at once. An engineer's answer to an agricultural problem: build the system, then let the system carry the growth.