Breaking new grounds
New Jumping Bean cafe — with full-service drive-thru — coming to Kelsey Drive
Locally owned and operated Jumping Bean Coffee has brewed up some consistent success with franchising since it began expanding operations a few years back.
Two cafés at Memorial University operated by Aramark, “have gone sort of gangbusters,” according to marketing manager George Murray, and a Jumping Bean at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax isn’t far behind.
A Gander café, opened in 2016, is faring very well and the Elizabeth Avenue location has created quite a buzz since it opened a couple of years ago.
“The entire east end of St. John’s just breathed a collective sigh of relief when Jumping Bean opened up there … because there had been nothing there to service that area and now it’s become a centre for the community,” Murray says.
“You can’t get a seat in that place at lunch and there’s always a lineup of 10 people.”
Much of the credit, he says, is owed to the hard work and dedication of franchisees Lesley and Karl Reid.
“They’re just incredible business partners and we love working with them.”
They’ve done so well, in fact, that they are set to a launch their second Jumping Bean this spring on Kelsey Drive.
“We’ve been strategically planning certain expansion areas that we want to get into and this was one of them,” Murray
says of the new location, a standalone building on the lower half of the busy thoroughfare just down the hill from Walmart and adjacent to several new office and commercial developments.
This latest café will not only be the biggest location to date, but will see Jumping Bean break into a new line of business:
drive-thru.
“All those guys in pickup trucks and reflective vests who are currently going through the Tim’s drive-thru, now that option is available to them with a better coffee that doesn’t even really cost more,” Murray says.
Technically, it’s not the first time a Jumping Bean has had a drive-thru. A Halifax location opened in Bedford in the summer of 2016 also boasted the convenience, but it’s no longer part of the corporate family.
Franchisees Nicole Myles Brook and Brian Brook purchased The Nook Espresso Bar + Lounge in downtown Halifax last year and expressed a desire to convert their Jumping Bean into another franchise for The Nook.
“We worked with them to transition them out of the franchise program because they wanted to have a Nook north. Our franchise system is pretty solid and set. We offer certain coffees and certain foods, and they felt like their clientele was more vegan and they had a different food pallet they wanted to try,” says Murray, who notes the company is already aggressively pursuing a new franchise in the Nova Scotia capital, and Aramark is considering bringing the brand to other universities where they’re contracted to provide food and dining services.
The new St. John’s location brings the total number of Jumping Beans to 11, but that number will drop to 10 when the kiosk at the St. John’s International Airport closes.
As part of the airport authority’s concession expansion program to add seven new dining options to the facility’s dining menu, Compass Group, which currently operates all the concessions inside the airport, made a pitch to stick around and keep the Jumping Bean alive. The airport authority, however, made the decision to seek independent operators versus the master concessionaire program, and Murray says Jumping Bean made the decision not to pursue the contract independently.
Franchising is just one component in Jumping Bean’s grander plan to expand the brand.
The grocery retail side of the business has grown significantly, thanks largely to the fully compostable Keurig coffee machine-compatible pods they introduced in 2015 in partnership with co-packer Club Coffee. The pods are already available at every Sobeys in Atlantic Canada, and Murray says they’ll soon be on the shelves of every Loblaws and Wal-mart store between here and Ontario, and at over a dozen Costco locations throughout Eastern Canada. “That’s really spiked in the last year and now we’re looking at trying to get our whole bean and ground coffees into these locations as well,” says Murray.
Last year, the company centralized all of its operations into one facility, and just completed a major research and development project to decrease the carbon emissions from its Eco2roast process from 85 per cent to close to 98. “In these last couple of years, at any moment it feels like it could tip over the hill and the boulder would start rolling downhill and we just needed to be ready.
“We’re poised. We’re ready to go.”