From side hustle to 58 locations: The story of Plato Coffee

Bruce Whitfield speaks to Plato Coffee co-creator, Stephan Bredell.

Listen below.

Did you know that your local favourite coffee shop, Plato Coffee started as a side hustle, in a shipping container?

Today, the Plato employs about 350 people nationwide, running 20-corporate-owned and 38 franchise locations with a state-of-the-art roastery.

Bredell says starting out they made the mistake of going overboard by including food and baked goods in their offering.

“I started a café and saw all the good margins were actually in the coffee, strip away the food and the waste… I think coffee is on the up.”  

- Stephan Bredell, Plato Coffee

“People often open coffee shops and they fall in the trap of doing food and then your food wastage eats into your drink gross profit.”

- Stephan Bredell, Plato Coffee

“In a normal restaurant, people know you make your money on the drinks so I thought imagine you don’t have any food, you don’t have any wastage and you don’t cut into your actual gross profit.”

- Stephan Bredell, Plato Coffee

“We said let’s just focus on good coffee, and if the shop doesn’t make it with good coffee alone, we are not going to sell sweets and cakes to make it.”

- Stephan Bredell, Plato Coffee

Their business model so far is to simply be a small business that offers good quality coffee, a model that appears to be working.

Scroll up to the audio player to listen to the discussion