Another coffee/cafe chain files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Coffee companies, cafes, and bakeries have struggled much like breweries in the post pandemic world.

Jun 23, 2024 - 03:30

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Another coffee/cafe chain files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

A lot of people follow their passions and sometimes that leads to great businesses. If you truly love something, you may be able to share that with other people and build a viable company.

The problem — and it's a big one — is that a lot of people share the same passions. Yes, you might be really good at smoking meat, have great recipes, for craft beer, or roast the perfect coffee bean, but so can many others.

Sometimes, that leads to mini-booms where a city ends up with a lot of similar businesses that in some ways support each other. Customers looking for local breweries might come to an area that boasts multiple craft brewers.

That's less likely to happen when it comes to other passion-based businesses, as hpw many cups of coffee or barbecue dinners can you have? In a lot of cases, businesses cannibalize each other.

There might even be a clear winner, a best in class, but each player siphons off some of the customers making it so everyone fails. It's very similar to what happened during the self-serve frozen yogurt boom.

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People liked the product enough for one, maybe two frozen yogurt shops to thrive in a market, but once more than that opened, everyone struggled and few survived.

Coffee shops and roasteries are a challenging business.
Image source: Shutterstock

The coffee business has been a challenge

A number of regional beer brands and breweries have gone out of business largely due to debt they took on during the covid pandemic. The end of that period coincided with a change in drinking habits that made beer less trendy, and many of the now-closed brands simply could not cover there debt.

The list of closed breweries include Forgotten Boardwalk Brewing of Cherry Hill, N.J., Tampa, Fla.-based King State, and even the famed Anchor Brewing of San Francisco has closed its doors for good. A number of other brewers chains have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and face an uncertain future. These include Roth Brewing Co. of Raleigh, N.C.,and in May, Harrisburg, Pa., craft brewer SpringGate Vineyard's owner, Schoffstall Farm.

It's a bleak time to be in the passion-based business game, which has hurt coffee roasters,growers, and cafe chains as well. California's Frinj Coffee filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January and Patis Bakery a cafe chain, which has multiple outlets in New York and New Jersey, filed in June as well.

Now, another coffee brand, Ink Coffee has just done the same.

Ink! Coffee filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on June 20 reporting assets of under $50,000 and debts between $1 million and $10 million.

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Ink! Coffee fights for survival

Ink! Coffee began in 1994 when founder Keith Herbert, visited to Italy to study the art of coffee making.

"He returned with a new appreciation for espresso and set out to make a living making coffee. On a cold winter morning, brewing hot coffee on a stainless steel cart located in Snowmass Village, ink! Coffee was born," the company shared on its website.

The coffee brand grew to multiple cafe locations and a roastery.

"Ink! Coffee beans are roasted at our facility in Denver's Rino neighborhood. In fact, you can watch the beans roast through the glass wall in our retail shop out front," the company shared. "The elevation allows for slower roasting, so we can fully develop the unique and distinct flavors of each of our different blends. Our Roaster meticulously roasts every bean on a small batch roaster, by hand, five days a week. No computers, no graphs, no charts to tell us how a certain coffee should be roasted."

More bankruptcy:

The company's bankruptcy filing does not include a funding or turnaround plan, but its cafes appear to be open and its website is still taking orders.

Ink! Coffee's said that it has between 50 and 99 creditors but does not include a list of creditors.