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Remember, only you can tell what kind of place you want to operate, and, be prepared for evolution, both the natural selection variety and the sudden evolutionary change variety. Decide, open, watch and listen, change if necessary. This is a summary page. Click the link more information within each section for further details: A cafe is a coffee bar, take out and sit down food service entertainment center. People go to cafe's to eat. Some have Breakfast and lunch, and some venture into dinner. You have to know food. Our cafe baked muffins and bagels and sweets and served sandwiches and salads. Some have table clothes and table service, but many are self service from a counter. I think of a cafe as a place to go to enjoy coffee, sweets, and breakfast, lunch or dinner. There may be entertainment in the evening. For our purposes here, then, I define a cafe as a coffee store with food. It is a totally different animal than a coffee bar or drink bar, or coffeehouse. What is a Cafe? A cafe is a place to go to eat, and to drink coffee and soft beverages and socialize and be entertained. Before the Cafe Before opening the cafe, I had a Mall Store for six years and it included drinks, beans, prepackaged, teas, cocoa, small appliances, mugs, teapots and baskets. And in the third year the Coffee Time store became the only store roasting in a mall. So I knew something about coffee before I opened the cafe. I followed my nose into the coffee business with visits to many coffee
sites and the SCAA convention in Seattle in 1990. I am the kind of
person who likes to learn by doing, so I created a coffee "cart and bar"
for us in farmers markets and hit the road to mix it up with real
people. It was great fun, a great learning experience and an
inexpensive Graduate Degree with a major in Coffee. It is also
very hard work and long hours. Carts are now found in hospitals at key entry points or by the main elevators, in rail stations, some libraries have them although you may not have the traffic you need in a library. Carts are self contained coffee bars. They are mobile. It is terrific for this reason and can be used for special events, county fairs, one festivals, and the like. Carts may be your only business. Or, the can be a part of a
saturation strategy for the town in which you live. You have a
mall store and a cafe and want to serve the college and hospital.
Buy some carts and get going. Join the SCAA, the Specialty Coffee Association of America and you will get the membership book and find more cart manufacturers. This is my favorite place to go. Comfortable, colorful, entertaining, library, coffee bar, bohemian or upscale or upscale bohemian. They may have light food menu's - organics and the like, and sweets - and lots of drink variety. Tables and couches, chess and checkers and maybe a DSL connection. Take out or sit down, rarely table service. God, there are so many different approaches to coffee houses
Coffee Houses I would define generally by the absence of heavy food menu's and more of a bar and reading environment. The distinctions could be lost on us and me and may not be important. Just open what you see in your head. All of the Coffee House menu items but not the space to sit and relax. this will have a light food menu, organics, sweets, lots of drinks and pick me up stuff. Take out. Barnes and Nobel Coffee Bar down the road from the Deptford Mall in
Deptford, New Jersey. This is a great, clean, efficient bar.
The bar uses ground coffee supplied by the roaster and a 8 oz. cup as a
scoop. They scoop out a cup of ground coffee, put it in the brew
basket, and brew the coffee. This is fine, saves on two grinders
and the time to grind, but requires frequent deliveries of coffee to
insure freshness.
In Line: In line simply means a store that is "in
the line of stores" down an aisle of the mall. Aroma and
visual signals are critical to success. I would expect to see
gifts, coffee accessories, beans, drinks, and baskets. Why pick a mall? Traffic. Fast starts. This section will include the types of mall stores but for the moment under locations we have a good discussion of mall operations and considerations. Go to Malls under locations.
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