The chai stall on Bannerghatta Road that stopped using kullhads (and what they switched to)
On a stretch of Bannerghatta Road in Bengaluru, there is a chai vendor who used to serve in kullhads. He switched about eight months ago. Not because he stopped loving the kullhad. Because he counted the cost.
He goes through about 180 to 220 cups of chai a day, depending on the season. The kullhads cost him roughly 2 rupees each in volume purchase. That is 360 to 440 rupees a day just in cups, not counting the breakage during stacking and transport. He has been serving chai at the same spot for eleven years. The kullhad cost, year over year, was finally larger than the kullhad romance.
What he switched to was rice husk tea cups. Reusable, oat-coloured, slightly heavier than a kullhad but lighter than a ceramic mug. He bought 300 of them upfront for about ₹15,000 — the same as roughly five weeks of kullhads. He cycles them through a small washing setup he already had. He has not broken more than fifteen since he started, and most of those were dropped during transport between stops, not by customers.
He told me, when I asked him about it, that the chai tastes the same as in the kullhad — minus the earthy terracotta note, which he misses, but only on the days when nobody asks him about it. Most of his customers did not seem to register the switch as a switch. They register a cup as a cup. The chai is what they came for.
This is the part of the rice husk tea cup story that does not show up in any of the marketing content the category has generated so far. The category is not winning because consumers fell in love with rice husk. It is winning because the people who serve chai for a living counted the cost of the alternatives and the maths worked.
Here is what I want to say about chai drinkware in India in 2026, because I think the conversation tends to swing between two unhelpful poles.
Pole one is the romantic pole — kullhad is the answer, anything else is industrial degradation. This is partially true. The kullhad does belong at the railway station. It does carry cultural specificity that no other vessel matches. It is also single-use by design, requires its own carbon footprint per cup served, and does not scale to serve 1.2 billion cup-a-day chai consumption in the country. Defending the kullhad as cultural heritage is different from claiming it as a solution to corporate chai service. Both can be true at once.
Pole two is the dismissive pole — ceramic is fine, glass is fine, stop overthinking this. This pole misses what shared-use ceramic actually costs in carbon terms. In a corporate office pantry serving chai across rotating staff, ceramic loses roughly 20 percent of its stock annually. For a 2,000-employee office, that is 400 replacement mugs procured every year — each re-incurring the manufacturing carbon footprint of the original. The recurring Scope 3 contribution is roughly 340 kg CO₂-equivalent annually from this single line item, compounding forever as a reportable BRSR disclosure. Broken ceramic shards also generate sharp injury risk to the informal waste workers who sort our garbage by hand. Treating this as a non-issue is what every previous office sustainability transition has done before quietly reversing back to disposables eighteen months later.
Rice husk tea cups sit between the two poles. They are not as culturally rooted as the kullhad. They are not as familiar as ceramic. They are the practical answer to a specific cluster of chai-serving problems that the older options do not solve well.
What they actually are, as a material: agricultural waste fibre — rice husk — fused with a food-grade binder. The cup is between 30 and 45 percent husk by composition. The binder is FDA-approved, IS 10910 compliant, BPA-free, and tested safe under IS 9845 at 100 degrees Celsius which is hotter than any chai you will ever drink. They do not break when you drop them. They do not crack from thermal shock. They do not absorb chai flavour over months of use. They are mechanically recyclable at end of life — grind, remould, reuse — with properties holding for approximately five cycles. The recycled material becomes furniture, automotive parts, construction materials. Not another tea cup, because current FSSAI regulation has not yet cleared recycled bio-composite binder for food contact in India. So the second life is real but in a different product category.
The cup is not biodegradable in a landfill. This is the part most sustainability marketing gets wrong, by deliberately or accidentally conflating recyclable with biodegradable. Rice husk tea cups are recyclable. They are not biodegradable. These are different end-of-life pathways and they should not be confused. The case for the category rests on durability across thousands of uses plus mechanical recycling at end of life — not on landfill behaviour.
The chai vendor on Bannerghatta Road does not know any of this. He bought the cups because the maths worked. The math is what scales. The cultural register, the BRSR compliance, the urban-aesthetic, the sustainability story — these all matter to specific audiences. But the maths is what gets the chai vendor and the corporate procurement head and the café owner and the hotel housekeeping manager to make the same switch.
Where will this go in the next two years.
The pessimist read is that the category remains small — a metro phenomenon, mostly in offices and cafés, never fully crossing over into mass chai service. The optimist read is that as the maths gets tighter and the BRSR reporting framework gets stricter, the bio-composite tea cup becomes the standard answer for corporate, café, hotel, and even mid-volume household chai service across India. The kullhad continues at the railway station as cultural heritage. The disposable plastic cup retreats. Glass and ceramic continue for home and high-end café use. Rice husk takes the middle ground that nothing else served well.
I think the optimist read is more likely, but with this important qualifier — the category survives only if the brands serving it maintain editorial discipline. Overclaiming on biodegradability, hiding behind 'plastic-free' marketing language that the material does not earn, refusing to name the food-grade binder for what it is — any of these compounds the category will not survive the next eighteen months of investor and regulatory scrutiny.
The honest version of the story is strong enough.
The chai vendor on Bannerghatta Road did not need anyone to tell him the cup was sustainable. He needed it to not break. He needed it to be cheaper over time than the kullhad. He needed it to not change the chai. The cup delivered on all three. That is the version of this category that scales.
The unbreakable chai cup is not the answer to every chai-serving question in India. It is the answer to the questions our older drinkware was quietly failing to solve.
From the team at TurtleTales. We make rice husk bio-composite tea and coffee cups in Bengaluru. Our VintageBrew and TurtleBrew tea cup ranges are exactly the kind of cup the Bannerghatta Road chai vendor switched to. We tried to write this analysis honestly, including the cultural register of what we are replacing. turtletales.eco