Blue Bottle looks to Korea for expansion
Oakland coffee company Blue Bottle is expanding its international footprint.
The burgeoning coffee giant announced plans to open a new location in the Seongsu neighborhood of Seoul in 2019. It will be the first international foray for Blue Bottle since opening a cafe in Tokyo in 2015.
Korea has been an enticing market for Bay Area businesses, especially bakeries and cafes, over the last few years. Since 2015, San Francisco hits like Tartine Bakery, Mr. Holmes Bakehouse and B. Patisserie have all established roots in the country.
Outside of the appealing market landscape in South Korea, Blue Bottle’s growth can also be attributed to an influx of capital, the lifeblood of expansion. Last year, Swiss food giant Nestlé
paid as much as $500 million for 68 percent of the company.
The merger turned heads in the coffee world, raising concerns that Blue Bottle was moving away from its original ethos. Nestlé generated $10.5 billion from its operations in 2016. Blue Bottle executives last year said that with the backing of Nestlé, the company would be able to develop its technology and open more domestic and international cafes and roasters. “There are people who are worried that this will mess up the things that they love about Blue Bottle,” the coffee company’s CEO, James Freeman, told The Chronicle last year when addressing the public’s concerns over the merger with Nestlé.
“That won’t be the case. We have complete autonomy over everything. I just ask that they trust us.”
When Nestlé purchased the controlling stake in Blue Bottle, the popular third-wave coffee company had 35 cafes spread across Oakland, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo. More were on tap for Brooklyn, N.Y., Washington, D.C., Miami and Boston. Today, Blue Bottle has 56 cafes in the U.S. and 10 cafes in Japan.