JO TO GO Coffee Featured as Recognized Brand Name in Lake Winnebago Business to Business Magazine

Drive-up coffee just wasn’t a convenience residents of northeast Wisconsin were familiar with when Dick DuBois opened the first Jo To Go® Espresso Bar near Bay Beach in Green Bay in late 1998.

DuBois built a tiny 336-sq. ft. coffee kitchen with drive-up windows on two sides of the building. But it was plenty of space to prepare an infinite combination of flavored mochas, lattes, cappuccinos, espressos, coffees and teas. The building even had a restroom â€" a must-have for employees. And it was the first double drive thru in the Midwest, DuBois reported.

By the following year, DuBois would open a second Jo To Go on College Avenue in Appleton, and over the next few years, other Jo To Go Coffee® shops would open in the Green Bay and Appleton areas, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee
--MORE--
and Racine. Today â€" depending on which day you read this article â€" there are 16 Jo To Go® locations in four states. A 17th store is slated for opening in the Savannah, Ga. area in late March. The stores represent a mix of five that are corporately owned, while the remainder are franchised to other individuals.

Entrepreneurship wasn’t completely foreign to DuBois, who grew up in a family of business owners. His father, Dan, started DuBois Formalwear in Green Bay, and years later his mother, JoAnn, would launch the complementing DuBois Bridal Chateau. Dick began working with the company at age 19, and stayed on board for 14 years, holding the highest post of vice president of sales and training for the company.

When Dick’s father decided in the late 1990s that he wanted to diversify the family business to provide more stability during the winter months â€" a seasonal lull for the formalwear industry â€" Dick began to put together a business model after experiencing the drive up coffee shop phenomenon in northwest Washington state.

While the Jo To Go® concept was originally intended to be part of the DuBois family business holdings, some confusion with the real estate purchase for the first store gave Dick the idea that perhaps he should shoulder the entire risk of this drive-thru coffee venture rather than place the burden on his family. After going off on his own in late 1998, the rest â€" as they say â€" is history.

When Jo To Go® first came to market, the maturity of the gourmet coffee trend in northeast Wisconsin was a shell of what exists today. DuBois said when the College Avenue store opened in Appleton in 1999, there were five gourmet coffees shops â€" defined as those that serve lattes â€" within a six-mile radius of the Jo To Go location. In 2007, there are more than 40 places selling lattes in the same geographic footprint.

“Starbucks is doing a wonderful job of educating people on coffee,” said DuBois, noting that the swanky giant of the coffee industry has also help familiarize consumers with the concept of drive-thru coffee, a boon to the Jo To Go® business model.
-- MORE --
As a full-service gourmet coffee house that is strictly a drive-thru, DuBois views Starbucks as his only substantive competitor. And though the charge for a cup of a specialty-brewed mocha or cappuccino can range as high as $4 at each coffee chain, DuBois said customers have adapted to the luxury of not making it themselves, not getting out of the car, and having a drink that tastes much better than a pot brewed at home.

“People will pay for better tasting convenience â€" and that’s what it is, better tasting convenience,” DuBois said.

After receiving a substantial, nontraditional education in coffee from Jim Stewart â€" who developed the Seattle’s Best coffee label and comes from the family of the 95-year-old Stewarts Private Blend â€" DuBois put painstaking effort into ensuring consistency across the board in the way each order was prepared and served. Consistent processes are often a key component to franchising, which DuBois was considering at the time. By October 2001, he sold his first franchise, now the Jo To Go located on Midway Road in Menasha.

“We had to develop the system to franchise, and that pretty much took about a year,” DuBois said. Today, potential franchisees go through a strict application, financial review and interview process in order to open their own Jo To Go.“You’re going to become family,” DuBois said of potential franchisees.

As for the future, DuBois is creating franchising opportunities in several eastern and southern states. Even though there’s become a surge of new coffee shops open in the past decade â€" particularly in Wisconsin and the Midwest â€" he believes there’s plenty of room to grow.

“The market is still very untapped. It’s not saturated,” he said.

Reprinted with permission from WB2B Lake Winnebago Business to Business. To check out the full article, as well as other great coverage of business news in Wisconsin's Fox Valley, visit the website: www.winnebagob2b.com.To learn more about JO TO GO Coffee® visit the fast, fabulous website: www.jotogo.com.

###