From one wall to a lot more: building with Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters
The wall behind the brewing bar at Blue Tokai Origins, Lado Sarai, started as stubble in a field in Haryana.
Their Gond artwork is printed straight onto it.
That’s the second café we’ve built with Blue Tokai. It’s worth telling the story of how we got there, because it didn’t start that way.
Ludhiana: one wall
The first was Blue Tokai’s second store in Ludhiana, their second cafe in the city. One installation. Their team on site put it up, and the logo went on afterwards.
One element. No artwork. A straightforward test of whether BIOMEBOARD™ belonged in a retail space at all.
It did. And that answer mattered more than the size of the job, because Blue Tokai is our first retail client. Everything we’d done before this lived in offices, institutions and interiors. A café is a harder room. It’s lit for atmosphere, people sit within arm’s reach of every surface, and the brand has to read clearly from the door.
52.3 sqft of BIOMEBOARD™. 80 kg of CO₂e stored in the board. ₹260 to the farmers whose stubble it was.
Lado Sarai: the artwork installation
The second was the Blue Tokai Origins café in Lado Sarai. Origins is Blue Tokai’s slower format, a space built for people to sit with their coffee rather than carry it out. The design came from the Blue Tokai team. We did the installation.
Two elements this time, both significant. The counter wall behind the brewing bar, and the arched artwork panels.
And for the first time, artwork directly on the board.
Most of the artwork is printed straight onto the surface, and the signage and logo are laser engraved into the board itself.
90 sqft of BIOMEBOARD™. 135 kg of CO₂e stored in the board. ₹700 to the farmers whose stubble it was.
What the material did
This is the part we’ve been most interested in since.
BIOMEBOARD™ isn’t a flat surface. It’s visibly made of compressed agricultural residue, and the flecks of straw are right there in the finish. The design didn’t work around it, but used it as the base layer of the image.
With high-contrast colour, the flakes sit behind the line work and give the artwork a depth that a smooth panel can’t. Under the café’s warm lighting the texture catches differently through the day. The gold in the arched panels shifts, and the engraved logo reads sharper at some hours than others. The placement of those arched artworks against the backdrop is doing a lot of the work, but the character comes from the board.
The material isn’t hiding under the design. It’s in it.
Two cafés so far
142 sqft of BIOMEBOARD™. 215 kg of CO₂e stored. ₹960 to farmers in Haryana.
India burns around 150 MT of crop waste every year. This is what the other path looks like, at the scale of two coffee shops.
What’s next
One café became two. One wall became a counter wall and a set of artwork panels. Each project has told us something the last one couldn’t.
Sustainability is built into both these spaces, in different ways and at different scales.
We’re hoping to be a larger part of the journey from here, and to build more retail examples like it. A wall people identify & photograph and ask about.
Craft beyond the cup.
FAQs
Can artwork be printed or engraved directly onto BIOMEBOARD™?
Yes. At Blue Tokai Origins in Lado Sarai, Blue Tokai’s Gond artwork was printed directly onto the BIOMEBOARD™ surface, and the signage and logo were laser engraved into the board itself. No veneer, laminate or applied panel was used. The board takes both print and engraving without a secondary finish layer.
Is BIOMEBOARD™ suitable for cafés and retail interiors?
Yes. BIOMEBOARD™ has been used in two Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters cafés, in Ludhiana and at Blue Tokai Origins in Lado Sarai, Delhi, for counter walls, arched artwork panels and signage. Retail and hospitality interiors are demanding environments because surfaces are lit for atmosphere, touched constantly and must carry brand artwork clearly.
What does BIOMEBOARD™ look like as a finished surface?
BIOMEBOARD™ has a visible texture, with flecks of compressed straw in the finish rather than a flat uniform surface. In the Blue Tokai installations this texture became part of the artwork: with high-contrast colour, the flakes sit behind the line work and add depth a smooth panel cannot, and the surface catches light differently through the day.
What is the printing process on BIOMEBOARD™?
Artwork is printed onto BIOMEBOARD™ using a flatbed UV printer, which prints a full 8ft by 4ft board in a single pass. The process runs in layers: a white base layer, then the colour layer, and then a varnish top coat where the application calls for it. Internal applications with no finish requirement skip the varnish. The inks are GREENGUARD certified by UL and low in VOC, which matters in enclosed interiors where the surface will off-gas into occupied space.