How to Choose the Perfect Location for Your Chai Bunk Franchise

For a Chai Bunk Café franchise, the container, branding, and menu set the stage—but the location decides the box office collections. A smart site can mean 6–8 months payback on Store/Express models and 12–18 months on Flagship/Highway formats, while a weak site can double that timeline. With over 120 stores across 5 states and nearly 50,000 cups served daily, Chai Bunk’s success is built on repeatable location principles every new franchisee can follow.​

Know Your Format: Match Model to Micro-Market

Chai Bunk offers four core franchise models—Store, Express, Flagship, and Highway—each designed for specific kinds of locations. Choosing the perfect spot starts with matching the right model to the local demand pattern and space realities.​

• Store Model: Best for compact urban markets and neighbourhoods with steady walk-in traffic; ideal where 150–300 sq ft is available at reasonable rent.​

• Express Model (10×10 container): Works near offices, colleges, hospitals, and transport hubs where quick service and visibility matter more than seating.​

• Flagship Model (16×8 container): Suited for prominent junctions, busy commercial zones, or mall-adjacent sites where you can build a “landmark” café feel.​

• Highway Model (24×8 with rooftop seating): Designed for highways and long-route corridors where travellers want a break, parking, and a memorable outdoor café experience.​

Start by asking: “Does my area behave more like a daily routine stop, an impulse pit stop, or a destination hangout?”—then pick the format accordingly.

Traffic, Not Just Footfall: Understand Who is Passing By

Raw footfall numbers can be misleading if the people passing by are not your ideal chai customers. A strong Chai Bunk location is one where a large share of daily traffic fits at least one of these profiles:

• Routine Visitors: Office workers, students, and locals who cross the spot twice a day, five to six days a week.

• Destination Guests: Shoppers, families, and youngsters who treat chai, burgers, and shakes as part of their “outing plan.”​

• Travellers: Highway users, bus passengers, and cab drivers looking for a quick, hygienic break.

The best sites cluster all three: for example, a container placed near a college road that also connects to an intercity route and has residential colonies behind it. Chai Bunk’s growth across Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu has largely come from such multi-purpose corridors.​

Visibility and Access: Make Your Container Impossible to Ignore

Chai Bunk’s container design is one of its biggest weapons—big branding boards, bright acrylic signage, and café-style aesthetics turn a simple unit into a visual magnet. The perfect location lets this branding work at 100% power.​

Focus on:

• Line of Sight: Your container should be visible from a distance, ideally from both directions of the road or from the main entrance of an institution or market.

• Access & Parking: Even the best-looking café struggles if vehicles cannot stop easily; highway and flagship locations especially need safe parking pockets.​

• Corner and Junction Plots: Crossroads, T-junctions, and turning points give you natural visibility from multiple angles, increasing impulse visits.

If people can see your branding for at least 5–10 seconds while approaching, you are giving the outlet a real chance to convert attention into footfall.

Surroundings: Piggyback on Existing Demand

You don’t build demand from zero; you place your franchise where demand is already flowing. Chai Bunk’s most successful outlets tend to be surrounded by demand generators:​

• Education hubs: Colleges, coaching centres, and schools where students seek affordable hangouts.

• Transport nodes: Bus depots, main roads, airports approach roads (like bypass roads like chai bunk store in shadnagar ), and busy intersections.​

• Mixed-use zones: Areas with a mix of offices, shops, and residential colonies that keep sales balanced through the day.

A simple rule: the more reasons people already have to come to an area, the less you need to “create” traffic with marketing.

Rent and ROI: Make the Numbers Work Before You Sign

A beautiful corner with impossible rent is a trap. Since Chai Bunk operates on a high-margin, high-volume model (50–60% gross margins with zero-wastage SOPs), your biggest fixed cost risk is rent. Before finalizing:​

• Benchmark rent as a percentage of projected monthly sales; for kiosk/container formats, this should typically stay lean enough to preserve margins.

• Use Chai Bunk’s indicative ROI timelines—6–8 months for Store/Express and 12–18 months for Flagship/Highway—as a test. If your rent assumptions push that beyond these ranges even in conservative scenarios, rethink the site.​

• Factor in nearby competition—not just other tea cafés but bakeries, juice shops, and QSR outlets that target the same wallet share.

The goal is simple: a location where your fixed costs comfortably fit inside your expected sales curve, not the other way around.

Check Infrastructure, Compliance, and Practicalities

Great location choices die on small practical issues if not checked early. Chai Bunk supports franchisees with FSSAI, GST, current account setup, and basic compliance guidance, but the physical site must cooperate.​

Before you commit:

• Confirm stable electricity and water access suitable for freezers, fryers, and tea boilers listed in the equipment package.​

• Ensure signage permissions are feasible—some areas restrict large boards or container placements.

• Clarify landlord terms on working hours, outdoor seating, rooftop usage (for highway models), and minor modifications.

A site that passes both demand and compliance checks becomes far easier to launch and scale.

Test Before You Lock: Observe, Count, and Validate

Treat location selection like an initial “mini market research project.” For one week, spend time at the shortlisted spot across different time slots:

• Count approximate footfall and vehicles per hour during peak and non-peak times.

• Note how many people already buy chai, snacks, or similar items nearby.

• Imagine where your container would stand, where people would queue, and where vehicles would stop.

When in doubt, share these observations with the Chai Bunk team and your dedicated account manager for feedback—they regularly see performance patterns across 120 stores and can flag common red or green signals.​

Our Team Can Help You

Turning the Right Location into a Flagship

Once you secure a strong site, the work doesn’t end; it begins. The perfect location amplifies the benefits Chai Bunk already gives you—Meta ads for one month, local action marketing plans, strong visual branding, and a menu engineered for repeat, high-margin sales. Use these tools to position your café as the default “chai stop” in that micro-market, not just one more option.​

With the right location, a Chai Bunk franchise is not just a tea outlet; it becomes a landmark. For entrepreneurs willing to put in the effort to choose wisely and execute consistently, that one container can be the start of a multi-outlet chai portfolio anchored by rock-solid unit economics