Pranav Dahiya joins Blue Tokai as chief business officer 

GURUGRAM: Career paths in Indian business rarely zigzag this hard. One month it’s pizza, the next it’s pour-overs. Pranav Dahiya has just been named chief business officer at Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters, the Gurugram-based specialty coffee chain, capping a résumé that has swung from corporate banking to fried chicken to flat whites without ever quite settling.

Dahiya took up the Blue Tokai role this month, after a year and two months as chief financial and strategy officer for Pizza Hut and a board member at Yum India, the local arm of Yum! Brands. Before that came four years and four months at Chaayos, the tea chain, where he rose from chief of staff to chief financial officer, a stretch that included scaling the cloud kitchen business, running P&L direction, and leading the acquisition of a cookie-and-coffee brand — sourced, structured, negotiated and closed end to end.

The trajectory only gets stranger the further back it goes. Dahiya spent a year as national sales manager for corporate and institutional finance at Hero FinCorp, working wholesale and structured finance and venture debt. Before Hero, nearly five years at Kotak Mahindra Bank saw him climb from vice president in the corporate and conglomerates group to regional manager for north and east India covering multinational corporates, cutting deals with chief financial officers and chief executives across Delhi NCR’s biggest business houses. Seven years at ING preceded that, split between relationship management roles courting promoter families and global treasuries alike, and the run started at Godrej, where Dahiya ran sales and a twelve-strong team’s P&L out of Bengaluru.

Dahiya describes himself, fittingly, as a business and finance professional whose career has chased passion and impact rather than a straight climb up the ladder — someone who, by his own account, can talk all day about business, investing and cafes. Blue Tokai now gets to test that claim where it counts: against India’s increasingly caffeinated, increasingly crowded specialty coffee market.

The signal is unmistakable. Banking discipline, quick-service-restaurant scaling and now a coffee roaster betting on premiumisation — Dahiya’s hire reads less like a hop and more like a deliberate bet that the next phase of Indian consumer business needs finance brains who’ve actually run the kitchen. Blue Tokai will be hoping the caffeine kicks in fast.