Bad Ass Coffee Bets on Non-Traditional Formats

Bad Ass Coffee of Hawaii now operates six non-traditional locations across the United States, from kiosks and carts to drive-thru-only units and shops inside airports, arenas, and grocery stores. The brand is pairing those smaller footprints with traditional cafes as it builds out the Southeast and Florida. For multi-unit operators, the story is less about the count and more about the options.

Why Format Optionality Changes the Math

A single cafe anchors a market, but it only reaches the traffic that passes its doors. President and COO Tom Wylie frames the extra formats as a way to capture demand a standalone store misses, dropping a kiosk inside a travel plaza or arena where the customers already are. When an operator can match the format to the real estate instead of forcing one box onto every site, the cost of entering a territory falls and the number of workable locations climbs.

Captive Audiences Lower the Build Risk

The brand's anchor example is a kiosk inside a 19,000-square-foot travel plaza off I-94 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the kind of high-volume, captive-audience site that skips a ground-up cafe build. Smaller formats carry lower buildout costs and shorter ramp times, so an operator can slot units between full cafes without tying up the capital a new building demands. That is how a brand speeds development without asking franchisees to overextend.

What Operators Should Watch

Non-traditional units live or die on their host venue, so site quality matters more than brand recall. An airport terminal or grocery anchor delivers steady foot traffic, but a weak host location strands a kiosk with no way to generate its own demand. Operators weighing the model should price each format on its own and judge it on the traffic the venue actually delivers, not the brand average.