How Edward Tirtanata became the coffee king of Indonesia
After dabbling in different business ventures, the Northeastern finance and accounting graduate founded Kopi Kenangan, the fastest-growing coffee chain in Southeast Asia.
There’s a strong case to be made that Northeastern University turned Edward Tirtanata into a coffee mogul.
There’s his coursework, of course: A degree in finance and accounting from the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, including a co-op at the Ernst & Young office in his native Jakarta. But he also tried coffee for the first time at the campus Dunkin’ Donuts.
“I started drinking coffee there,” Tirtanata says of the grab-and-go storefront across from the Curry Student Center. The 2010 graduate got into the habit of picking up a big cup on his way to class or the library — a ritual that would foreshadow his entrepreneurial future.
Fifteen years later, Tirtanata is the co-founder and CEO of Kopi Kenangan, the largest coffee chain in Indonesia. Founded in 2017, the company has more than 1,200 locations across Southeast Asia; new stores are currently opening at a rate of one per day, according to Tirtanata. The privately owned company reached $1 billion in valuation in 2021 — what’s called a “unicorn” in startup investment terms.
“We’ve been able to grow very quickly,” Tirtanata said. “If you’d asked me in 2017, I’d have never guessed we could open one store per day.”
Aided by his finance background, Tirtanata and his partners took advantage of a gap in the coffee market and the rising ubiquity of mobile commerce to fuel the company’s growth. But even before he knew what his business future would look like, he knew it would be Indonesian.
“I always knew that I wanted to come back after Northeastern,” he said. “I didn’t even try to find a job in the U.S.”
A ‘wake-up call’
Tirtanata was born and raised in Indonesia, with two sisters and business-minded parents. As a kid, his moneymaking ventures included selling Pokémon cards. “I did a lot of small businesses, even in middle school,” he says. “I always had a passion for it.”
Tirtanata claims to have “barely studied” in high school but managed to get accepted into Northeastern’s engineering program at the urging of his parents. He quickly switched to finance and accounting.
Shortly after, one of his father’s businesses went south, forcing him to declare bankruptcy. His family’s financial difficulty “was a wake-up call,” he said. “It changed everything for me. I went from barely studying to, you only see me at the gym or in the library.”
Though his plan had been to study in the U.S., he was always headed back to Indonesia — for co-op, he worked in Ernst & Young’s Jakarta office to learn the ins and outs of the country’s tax laws.
“There’s not much point in going to Ernst & Young in the U.S. if I know I’m going back,” he recalled thinking. “There are different tax codes, so it wouldn’t apply.”
After graduating with a double degree in finance and accounting, Tirtanata went into commodities trading with his father — which was good business, until it wasn’t.
“The commodities market crashed in 2014, and I just couldn’t do anything,” he remembered. “I was at the mercy of the market, and the prices dropped by two-thirds. There was no way we could stay afloat. After that, I promised myself my next venture would be in a business where I could control my price.”
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The right price
For his next phase, Tirtanata zeroed in on consumer goods, first co-founding a small chain of premium tea houses called Lewis & Carroll. It did well, but his ambitions were bigger; soon his attentions turned to coffee.
The Kopi Kenangan concept sprouted from a pricing gap in the Southeast Asian market. At the pricier end was Starbucks, which Tirtanata suspected was too expensive for most Indonesians with daily coffee habits to afford. The statistics back this up: one informal economic rubric, called the “Starbucks Index” or the “Latte Index,” charts the purchasing power of world currencies against the U.S. dollar based on the price of a local cup of Starbucks coffee.
According to that metric, “Indonesia is the ninth-most unaffordable tall latte in the world,” Tirtanata said.
The first Kopi Kenangan (which roughly translates to “Coffee Memories” in Indonesian) opened in Jakarta in 2017 — a grab-and-go storefront with no seating, low prices and attention-grabbing names on the menu (The company’s best-selling drink is called Es Kopi Kenangan Matan: In Memory of my Ex-Girlfriend’s Coffee.) By the end of 2018, there were 50 locations; the next year, another 150.
“Ed is a very driven person,” said Junxian Li, Kopi Kenangan’s vice president of corporate development and finance. Each year, he said, Tirtanata tries to push the company’s already impressive growth to an even higher level. “He inspires all of us who work with him to share his vision of growth and success and is able to strike a balance between being demanding and empathetic.”
In 2021, Kopi Kenangan became a “unicorn” — a privately held company valued at over $1 billion, backed by venture capital investors including Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital. Since then, locations have expanded across Southeast Asia, and Tirtanata has his sights on other continents. In addition to the just-right price of a cup of its coffee, he credits his and his investors’ timing. The company came along just as mobile commerce was becoming ubiquitous, and its business model was a perfect fit. Seventy percent of orders are placed via cellphones.
Still, he said, the nuts (if you will) and bolts of the company’s success came from Northeastern, where long nights studying to become a finance whiz were fueled by a large Dunkin’ drip coffee.
“I definitely wouldn’t have been able to raise this much capital, or run a billion-dollar company without those finance and accounting classes,” he said. “That really taught me everything I needed to know.”
