A thinned office crowd isn’t stopping Ken Zeff, owner of Yinz Coffee, from quadrupling down on the Golden Triangle.
The serial entrepreneur is preparing to open a nearly 4,000-square-foot cafe Monday in the Frick Building — his fourth in Downtown Pittsburgh, 11th total and largest ever.
“I still see a lot of people down there and think there’s an opportunity… to serve these folks who need a cup of coffee,” Zeff told TribLive on Thursday.
Converting the space from a bank and salon into a coffee shop was complicated by the building’s advanced age, Zeff said. The Frick Building is a 124-year-old landmark office building on Grant Street.
It took him nearly a year to make the necessary changes.
Zeff took the challenges in stride, having pretty much seen it all in the coffee business.
He founded Crazy Mocha in 2000, growing it to 31 locations across the Pittsburgh area before selling the company in 2018. By 2020, the company filed for bankruptcy protection.
Zeff, who also runs restaurant equipment wholesaler Penn Fixture and Supply and Breadbox sandwich shop, opened Yinz Coffee the following year.
But he’s far from the only person start — or restart — a regional coffee company in recent years. There are countless independents.
Laura Karet, the former head of Giant Eagle, has also started aggressively expanding her 7 Brew drive-thru coffee chain into Southwestern Pennsylvania.
The market could be nearing its limit, in Zeff’s view.
“There’s certainly some opportunities here and there, but the amount of national brands coming in and the amount of locals opening up, there’s certainly going to be some folks who aren’t going to survive that,” he said.
His company briefly benefited when a handful of area Starbucks stores went offline as part of a nationwide strike, taking the biggest coffee player out of the game in some neighborhoods.
“We definitely saw an influx (of customers),” Zeff said. “You could tell when they came in and asked for a frappuccino.”
