Design was the first discipline. Chai became the practice.
Trained as a graphic designer and brand strategist, Jiten spent his early career building identities for European clients and designing journeys for travellers arriving in India for the first time — two disciplines built on the same instinct: translating one culture's sensibility into a form another audience trusts immediately. Chai, when it came, needed the same instinct applied to a cup.
Across every industry Jiten has worked in, the thread has been experience design — twenty years spent understanding how trust is built, how delight is delivered, how awe is inspired, and how to make someone simply comfortable in their own skin. Through design, spaces, travel, chai, and food, the instrument has always been the same: sensory perception. The brain produces sensation as a direct response to signals from the senses, and every product decision at Jugmug starts from mapping that response — engineering for the physiological impact a flavour creates, not for the story built around it.
What began as a pushcart at a handicraft fair grew into a working library of over 180 herbs and spices, and a brand trusted by some of India's largest hotel chains after multiple rounds of tasting. Its most enduring form is a 120-seat café in Champa Gali, one of New Delhi's best-loved creative neighbourhoods, in Saket — running since close to the brand's earliest days. Thirteen years in, that's still the hardest market in the world to get chai wrong in.
Jugmug's approach to chai and hospitality has been covered in the Indian and international press.
Berlin is the same instinct, meeting a new audience — not exporting Indian chai, but building it for how Europe actually drinks its milk-based beverages. Jugmug Chai Lab is where that translation happens.
Jugmug Chai Lab also builds co-branded product lines and bespoke flavour development for cafés, hotel groups, and F&B brands entering the chai and functional-beverage category.
See Collaborations →