Inside The Indonesian Starbucks Challenger That’s Betting On Affordable Premium Coffee

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On a muggy February afternoon, the Kopi Kenangan café at the Alam Sutera mall in suburban Jakarta is buzzing with customers. The bestseller on its menu is Kopi Kenangan Mantan, a blend of Indonesian robusta and arabica beans—, milk, creamer and gula aren, the local palm sugar. Queuing up to place his order, 23-year-old marketing management student Elson Rochilie says he appreciates the range of premium coffees on offer at pocket-friendly prices.

Rochilie fits the customer profile the chain’s cofounder and CEO, Edward Tirtanata, was going after when he opened the first Kopi Kenangan grab-and-go store in the Indonesian capital in 2017: young people looking for an alternative to cheap instant coffee sold by street vendors but who didn’t want to pay more than double the price charged by international chains such as Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts.

Positioning itself in that sweet spot has paid off for Kopi Kenangan, which became a unicorn in 2021 after raising $96 million in a series C funding round and overtook the local unit of Starbucks in retail reach two years later. Today, it claims to be Indonesia’s biggest coffee chain with a third of the market and 1,136 outlets, as well as 188 overseas, as of December. Eyeing what he reckons is a burgeoning customer base for quality Indonesian coffee, 37-year-old Tirtanata is brewing a plan to invest $200 million to more than triple the store count to 4,000 by 2030. “We’d like to be the single company or brand that is the most dominant in Southeast Asia, not just by store count but by revenue and profitability,” he declares. The entrepreneur’s ambitions dovetail with a regional retail coffee business undergoing rapid change, according to Roshan Behera, a Singapore-based partner at India-headquartered Redseer Strategy Consultants. Consumers “are moving away from unorganized, low-quality channels,” Behera says in an email, in favor of “a guaranteed, elevated experience.” At the same time, premium coffee drinkers are seeking alternatives “that offer high-end quality without the expensive price tag,” he says.

In an April 2025 report, Redseer estimates that Indonesia’s coffee market—including coffee sold in cafes, restaurants and hotels as well as retail outlets–will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11% to $12.6 billion by 2030 from $6.7 billion in 2024. With a rising middle class and higher disposable incomes, it predicts out-of-home consumption of coffee will increase over that period to between 65% and 70% of the total from around half in 2024.

To catch that wave, Kopi Kenangan has been on a tear, opening 347 stores last year, or nearly one a day. The CEO discloses that the chain, after running up losses for five consecutive years following the Covid-19 pandemic, returned to profitability in 2025 with net profit of $17 million on a 45% jump in revenue to $184 million. Keeping up the momentum, sales surged 70% to $57 million in the first quarter from a year ago, says Tirtanata, adding that he’s targeting revenue of $650 million by 2030.

So far, Kopi Kenangan has garnered a total of $234 million over at least five funding rounds, the most recent being its Series C, from a star-studded galaxy of investors, including American rapper Jay-Z’s VC firm Arrive and American tennis player Serena Williams’s Serena Ventures.

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