Inside the Coffee Club
When The Coffee Club opened the doors to its first store on Brisbane’s Eagle Street Pier on Monday November 2 1989, Directors Emmanuel Drivas, Emmanuel Kokoris and John Lazarou unknowingly began one of Australia’s most successful franchises.
Their idea was to create more than just a place where people could meet for coffee; it was to provide a relaxed meeting place that is casual yet sophisticated, stylish yet affordable. In short, their plan was to meet an untapped need in the Australian hospitality market. Last year, The Coffee Club celebrated 21 years in operation, employing more than 6,000 employees and serving more than 40 million coffees annually in its 280 cafés across Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, New Caledonia and China. These statistics make The Coffee Club Australia’s largest home-grown café group, famous for its Good Food, Great Service and Excellent Coffee.
The Coffee Club offers three types of dining experiences; a fully-licensed, extended-hour Café Bar Restaurant with full table service and an extended menu with Chef’s Choice options; a Club store, which is typically located in high pedestrian areas and focuses on light meals and snacks with counter service; and the Kiosk, a counter service shopping centre option.
To this day, The Coffee Club strives to maintain its essence of being a family-grown business and strongly believes it is what has made the company boom. The Coffee Club has grown exponentially and has became a much-loved brand focused on not only providing a great place to meet, but a brand that contributes to and involves the Australian community year after year.
Over the last two decades, it has been estimated that The Coffee Club has donated more than $5 million to dozens of charities including the Royal Children’s Hospital, National Breast Cancer Foundation and Think Pink, Fire Fighters Calendar supporting the burns unit at Westmead Children’s Hospital and The Royal Children’s Hospital, B105 Christmas Appeal, New Zealand Telethon, AEIOU, The Variety Club, Apex Australia, SIDS and KIDS Red Nose Day, and Cerebral Palsy.
In a move to ensure the Group’s corporate social responsibility program extends beyond its charity support and into its everyday product offering, The Coffee Club coffee now has the stamp of approval from UTZ CERTIFIED – one of the world’s largest coffee certification programs which aims to set the world standard for socially and environmentally responsible coffee production and sourcing.
Unlike other certified programs which require only 30 per cent of coffee beans to be grown using sustainable methods, the UTZ program offers customers the assurance that 90 per cent or more of the beans in every cup comes from a certified farm (read more about our UTZ CERTIFIED coffee here).
In June 2008, Minor International, one of the largest hospitality and leisure companies in the Asia Pacific region with more than 1,000 restaurants and 27 hotels, bought a 50 per cent stake in the company, fuelling its international growth. As a direct result, The Coffee Club has expanded into 5 new Thai locations since opening its first store in the country in February 2009 and is now looking at appointing master franchisees in Hong Kong, Singapore, New Caledonia and Dubai.
Along with securing visible positions in retail precincts and high street-style locations, The Coffee Club’s striking black and white logo and modern café-style decor has contributed to its strong brand awareness. In order to continue building its brand awareness, which The Coffee Club recognises as the major key to its international and national expansion plans, it has an extensive marketing strategy in place that includes a regularly changing calendar of in-store promotions and sponsorship of sporting teams including the Brisbane Roar and various other community events.
It is not only The Coffee Club’s commitment to Good Food, Great Service and Excellent Coffee, but its ability to constantly refresh its marketing and brand strategy coupled with a dynamic franchise system that is driving its success both within Australia and beyond our shores.