If you run the numbers and do the math, both the café and bakery business model have a lower cost of operation and higher profit margin than other food service models, even food trucks. We can argue bakery and café food trucks but they cannot scale – however, this can be an additional revenue booster and promotion tool. Let’s add that to this conversation as a bonus.

In this article, we want to show how to establish your chillhop bakery with the same elements of your chillhop café and have it compliment each other. We will discuss how both models can work with each other to float all boats in your cappuccino and crumcake empire.

Baked Bread vs Cappuccino

Your chillhop café is a space for people to have a caffeine pickup while studying, or having a light conversation with friends. Your chillhop bakery will be a space where people can get baked bread to take home for dinner or have a light bread snack at the table.

You seen in coffee shops that they offer muffins, cheese Danish that can go along with your coffee. If someone goes into the bakery, they may want a coffee or a drink to accommodate their crumcake. This allows you to use both the café and the bakery to supply to each other with either coffee for the bakery and baked bread for the café.

This is the kind of model you want to pursue where any new venture can compliment the existing business model. This is a win-win expansion because you can supply both establishments with products from each other.

Your Customer Profile

Your customer demographics will be a great one and one of the best customer profiles. It will be a diverse set of mature grown folks. Your business strategy will attract working class single adults and married couple, young and old, enjoy your bakery to take home and use your café as a third space.

One thing I would consider is creating a loyalty card for both of your establishments where they will get points for both the café and the bakery. This promote a lifestyle which is what you want to convey – a third space to chill and have a little special moment to yourself.

Be mindful that you are building a new set of customers who don’t like nightclubs and nightlife and want to hang out during the day, work and study alone or in a small group, network with like-minded grown folks. This is a new paradigm that both your café and bakery support.

Be mindful this model is a European model of café and bakeries. Also, Japan and Thailand has a beautiful chill café culture that frankly, does not exist in America. The vibe is not in America, sorry.

DJ Set vs Broadcast Set

At your chillhop café, it is where you likely have a DJ that is either mixing tracks, or a listening room style of playing tracks like a radio station. This is a lively element for a chillhop café to operate as a chill day club model for singles and professional customers.

At your bakery, we recommend you get a Bluetooth speaker like a Marshall Action III and play chillhop, smooth jazz, classic R&B from the speaker. The goal is just let them come in, get a dozen of muffins or bread loaves to take home to eat with their shrimp fettucine with white alfredo sauce and mushroom and garlic – that’s what they going to cook and serve your French loaves with.

It is normal, especially in Japan to just drop in a bakery and have a sweet treat or quick carb meal after work with a drink before headed home on the busy subway. So you want to set an intimate atmosphere for your customer to feel like they have this kind of space they can have that little moment of recluse while reading a magazine and having a crumcake and an americano.

Synergy Logistics

We have seen where a popular bakery has a food truck they can take to events or show up at a corporate office to serve the coffee and bake bread for the morning movers. Think about the Washington DC Mall area with all the food trucks lined up across the Capitol and the Mall.

We think the food truck can serve two purposes – to promote the business around time serving the food and blasting chillhop music. This is a good way to tell them to come and visit your establishments and scan a QR code to join the loyalty program on their mobile phone. The loyalty program is run on a VPS managed by a beautiful sista expat who moved to Hua Hin, Thailand from Dearborn, Michigan.

The second purpose is to move the coffee to the bakery and move the bake muffins to the café. One thing is you are going to have good profit margins and will expand to the point to have a commercial kitchen to bake the bread in higher numbers and ship the bread to establishments. The coffee should always be made on premise at the cafe but you can get away with a coffee carafe to serve at the bakery.

Area Domination and Synergy

You have a lot of run way creating a chillhop-based empire in communities around the world. You create your own brand and name and probably can easily seize a nice market share of the coffee chain market. There is one strategy we have to recommend – area domination.

Area domination is a concept pioneered by Seven-Eleven convenience stores where they do not open one shop in a market; they open at least 10 stores in a local area. There is two reasons for this – to allow the local community get familiar with the brand and make it easy to distribute to these stores in a central location, hub and spoke strategy.

You should target a community or area to bring both the chillhop café and chillhop bakery in an area to be a new trendy space for a new generation. Once you establish yourself in a community, the chillhop truck will help promote your brand, you can cater both the coffee and baked food for companies and trade events.

This is how you build a synergy and theme-based empire and we believe the bakery and the coffee shop should have little overhead except for the initial equipment. But there is a lot of possibilities here and should be considered further as a business model to pursue.