People
Kappi started with an idea, but it took a rather particular collection of people to turn it into a place.
KATE & JACOB — WHERE IT STARTED
We met during our yoga teacher training in Mysore and became friends somewhere between classes, long conversations and repeated escapes to our favourite little coffee shop.
Coffee was an obvious shared love, but there was much more that connected us — yoga, spirituality, travel, design, creativity, curiosity and a tendency to look at things and wonder how we might do them differently.
The idea of creating a café had already been growing in our heads separately. Through our conversations in Mysore, it gradually became something we could imagine creating together.
We also brought very different worlds into it.
Jacob is originally from Spain and lives in Paris, where he works as a perfumer. His world combines creativity, senses and an extraordinary attention to detail,
alongside his love of yoga, spirituality, travel and exploring different cultures.
Kates path began with design, followed by more than twenty years in London's hospitality world. Later came nutrition, fitness, yoga and a deep fascination with longevity, wellbeing and biohacking.
Jacob curiosity about how things are composed brought him to study chemistry and later on, his passion for smells pushed him to become a Perfumer. He is always willing to try new dishes, flavors and then add it to his creative thinking process imagining new combinations.
Kappi became somewhere all of those seemingly unrelated pieces could meet.
We always knew our lives would continue alongside it. Jacob would return to Paris and the career he loves, while I would remain in India, overseeing Kappi while continuing to develop other creative projects.
What we needed was a team who didn't simply execute our ideas, but would bring their own.
PRADEEP — MAKING IT POSSIBLE
Kate met Pradeep in Rishikesh a few months before we found our location.
She was immediately taken by his positive energy, gentle heart and very useful “we'll find a way” attitude.
When we realised how important it would be to have a local partner who genuinely understood Rishikesh, Pradeep was the obvious choice.
He became instrumental in turning Kappi from drawings and ideas into something physical.
Navigating how things get done locally came with a considerable learning curve. Pradeep helped with landowners, local businesses, suppliers and, eventually, communication with the workers who transformed our designs and an empty patch of dirt into Kappi Cup.
He became the bridge between the idea and the place you see today.
ARYAN — COFFEE, CURIOSITY & THE NEXT VERSION
Aryan's path to Kappi wasn't particularly planned either.
His original plan was to go to Europe. Around the same time, a position opened at Kappi — and somewhere between that opportunity and our shared obsession with coffee, the plans changed.
We're very glad they did.
Coffee is his great passion, but simply making something the same way every day was never going to satisfy him.
He experiments. Reinvents. Tries again. Perfects. Give him a new ingredient and it won't be long before there is a new drink appearing for everyone to taste.
His other great love is fitness, which makes him particularly at home with Kappi's growing interest in protein, nutrition and functional drinks.
And his curiosity doesn't stop there. He's currently working his way through the Kappi library, devouring books on fitness, nutrition, psychology and personal development.
That desire to keep learning, experimenting and improving is exactly the energy we want Kappi to have.
YASHIKA — MAKING HEALTHY LOOK DELICIOUS
If Aryan drives much of our experimentation with drinks, Yashika has become the creative force behind our food.
She searches, researches, discovers recipes and then inevitably starts changing them.
Her challenge is very Kappi: take something delicious and ask whether we can make it cleaner, fresher, more nutritouse and lower in refined ingredients — without losing the part that makes you actually want to eat it.
Most of our food is freshly made at Kappi, with a focus on whole ingredients, more protein and less refined sugar and processed food. Yashika has truly made this philosophy her own.
She's also looking towards studying business and management, which we're delighted to support. We want the people helping Kappi grow to have the opportunity to grow with it.