Food for thought

Photo courtesy of Bayview Gardens

The past two decades have seen a steady increase in garden centers with cafés and restaurants, inspired partly by artisan coffeehouses and European IGCs with high-end eateries at their hearts. Even so, U.S. examples remain uncommon: Garden Center’s 2021 State of the Industry report found only 10% of IGCs had a café on the grounds.

For IGCs that include a food venue, results have been mixed. Last year, 2% of IGCs cited their café as their most profitable division, even exceeding their retail garden center. Yet, at the same time, like many pandemic-hit hospitality businesses, some IGC eateries struggled to find and keep the balance — and staff — needed for continued success.

Offering food or drink at your garden center can separate you from the pack. But is a coffee shop, café or full-blown restaurant right for you and your IGC? There’s no easy, one-fits-all answer. From space and equipment to staffing and cleaning, opening a food venue involves unique demands.

Photo courtesy of Bayview Gardens

Developing and refining your vision

Every IGC owner’s café goals will differ — but having a vision is essential. For Maureen Murphy, owner of Bayview Garden and Flower House Café on Washington state’s Whidbey Island, a food venue was always in the plans. But it took more than a decade after the IGC’s 1993 launch to take the first café steps.

Murphy’s vision took inspiration from four tours of English garden centers. “My favorite retail garden centers there all had wonderful cafés associated with them — I’m talking about really nice food. So I’ve always known that I needed the food component to my business,” she says.

England also influenced the café at Briggs Garden & Home in North Attleboro, Massachusetts. Retail Manager Steve Shumila and General Manager Gary Briggs were impressed by the popularity of garden center cafés and restaurants they saw while touring there. When sales outgrew the 61-year-old business’s facilities, 2007 construction tucked a small café in the new garden center’s corner.

Photo courtesy of Bayview Gardens

Maypop Coffee & Garden Shop, located in a St. Louis, Missouri, inner suburb, was born when three coworkers decided a component was missing at the IGC. Backed by one founder’s specialty coffee industry experience, the trio launched the Maypop Café in a historic home alongside their new garden center right before Mother’s Day 2018.

“It was this concept of wanting to expand the dialogue about the plant world with the community,” says Mackenzie Leek, Maypop’s digital marketing manager. By combining the communal aspect of coffee with plants, the founders hoped to “meet people where they are” and provide a welcoming gateway to gardening.

Photo courtesy of
Bayview Gardens

Photo courtesy of
Bayview Gardens

While many IGC food venues start with basics — like people, coffee and pastries — spending time to define and refine long-term goals up front can help you stay on track.

“People need to figure out the scale of what their potential is and plan for that vision, because you can waste a lot of time and money and effort by thinking too small,” Murphy says.

Finding space and planning ahead

Space, for now and the future, is a primary consideration when planning a café. Shumila emphasizes knowing your floor space and what you’ll be giving up: “You’ll be taking space away from something else that you’re already selling,” he says.

Café sales at Briggs flourished as the community embraced the concept. “It tripled or quadrupled in the same number of years,” Shumila says. With just a counter, no seating space and a closet-sized kitchen, sales went from $30,000 to $150,000 in less than four years.

Two significant upgrades followed as Briggs growth continued. Most recently, Shumila and team looked beyond existing indoor space to an outdoor patio. Reimagined and enclosed as part of a $250,000 café expansion, the space helped more than double Briggs café seating capacity.

Changing demographics on Whidbey Island helped Murphy’s Flower House Café at Bayview Garden find its space. Known initially as Bayview Farm and Garden, the IGC had an animal feed department in a big red barn. But Seattle-area weekenders and day trippers outplaced chickens, goats and other animals once part of island life.

As Whidbey became a tourist destination, Murphy realized closing the feed department opened new doors. A total barn revamp in 2015 brought a coffee bar — the first step in Murphy’s vision.

Today, a destination café in half the barn space offers locally roasted coffee prepared by trained baristas, wines and other beverages, and in-house culinary creations made from all fresh ingredients, including some produce and edible flowers grown on site. Murphy plans to develop an evening venue in the remaining barn space — most likely a botanically oriented cocktail bar.

Shumila stresses that café planning involves more than space. He urges IGC owners to talk with local officials early on, so you understand the regulations involved. Leek agrees that doing all your homework is important. “You have to talk with the city where you are and make sure everything is legit,” she says. And that includes requirements for serving specialty coffees and even pastries made by bakery partners off-site.

Photo courtesy of Bayview Gardens

Shumila explains, “Cafés have a lot more restrictions than a garden center. You almost have to be a restaurateur to know all your requirements.” From cleaning to venting and plumbing, expenses can escalate quickly as unforeseen mandatory add-ons, like extra sinks and handwashing stations, inflate upgrades you had in mind.

Managing and controlling your vision

Murphy’s launch of the Flower House Café coincided with serendipitous family events. Her daughter, then a San Francisco-based pastry chef, married a fantastic cook she met at work and — one grandbaby later — decided to return to island life. The couple runs the café, blending their restaurant expertise with Murphy’s vision for the space — both critical elements to success in Murphy’s eyes.

“That’s a key component of any kind of café. Somebody has to run it, and it has to be done right,” Murphy says. “It has to be somebody who knows what they’re doing. A garden center owner is not going to be able to run a café.” Options include hiring experienced managers or renting the space to a café business, which can complicate staying true to the vision that sparked the space.

While some garden centers have success renting café space to others, your comfort level may be different. “I definitely have to control my vibe and my image. I’m really into that it has to be my vision. I’m the vision keeper of my company,” Murphy says.

At Maypop, the vision that specialized, handcrafted coffees requires is nurtured. “The plan wasn’t just to have a coffee pot. It was to really hone in on the process of specialty coffee, and to bring that really exciting feeling to it,” Leek says. “ … People know their coffee and they really want to go to a place where people understand.” Careful management and training keep that vision intact.

At Briggs, the team originally considered renting space to a café business. “The problem is, what happens if they’re not well run? That reflects right back on your company because people may or may not know that you aren’t the owners of that café,” Shumila says. With that in mind, they chose to keep the café operations — and control — in-house.

Whatever approach you take, be sensitive to café manager burnout, Shumila adds. Unlike a garden center with spring rush and slower seasons to recoup, restaurant management is a day-in, day-out, on-site job with no seasonal breaks.

Staffing your café

It’s no secret that garden center staffing can be tough. But both Murphy and Shumila say café staffing is tougher yet. Shumila notes his café lacks the garden center’s stable, long-term, full-time employees and experiences higher employee turnover.

“Staffing is very difficult, like a restaurant, where you’re going to be busy from 11:00 to 3:00,” he says. “Try to hire people that you can get in that are knowledgeable and willing to work hard four hours a day. Because you need six people on staff during that time and you only need three on all the rest.”

Murphy agrees: Café staffing is the hardest part of staffing her business. “It’s hard finding people to work right now, and it’s extra hard finding restaurant workers,” she says. “ … You just have to navigate that whole thing, and you have to have a situation where people want to work because they have a lot of options.”

That includes flexible scheduling, which Murphy calls a huge but necessary pain. “You have to be really light on your feet and adaptive to the modern worker, and what their needs are and what they’re able to do for you,” she says.

Photo courtesy of
Bayview Gardens

Photo courtesy of
Bayview Gardens

Once the staff is on board, keeping them happy and feeling good about their jobs, workspace and coworkers is critical to keeping café customers happy, too.

“My thing with my staff is we have to generate love. The love and the positive vibe are what attracts the public to us. And in order to generate love, we have to have that dynamic happening between all of us. The back-of-the-house vibe shows up in the front of the house,” Murphy says.

Leek shares that staffing during Maypop’s launch and growth was a learning curve. “We definitely value the human in every aspect of this process. So, getting a nice work-life balance is really important. … We’re a pretty close, tight-knit group of folks,” she says.

While there have been transitions and turnovers, Maypop focuses on transparency and open dialogue about their values, their culture and their vision starting with the interview process. “I think people just really feel seen and heard here and that’s very much something we put a lot of value into,” Leek says.

Handling popularity’s pressures

Even when you envision a small café with no expansion plans, the pressure to have more food, more beverages, more people and more equipment can hit hard and fast.

Murphy launched her coffee bar in 2015 with espresso drinks, a soup warmer, a panini machine and a convection oven for baking pastries. She invested in premium equipment, including a top-of-the-line espresso machine, but underestimated the demand.

Photo courtesy of
Briggs Garden & Home

“We made the mistake in not knowing how fast it was going to grow and how much we would need,” she says. The café became a busy gathering place for islanders and visitors willing to wait in line regularly. She felt pressed by the public to offer more and pressed by herself to seize the opportunity.

“The pressure got to the point where we said, ‘We need to build a real kitchen,’” Murphy explains. That involved a major remodeling, from a hood and range to fire walls and inspections. “It’s major if you’re going to cook food,” she says. “… That was the next big step for us, so we did that.”

Murphy also took advantage of early COVID closures to upgrade the café space, including a now-covered cobblestone courtyard and sliding windows to enclose a porch and keep customers warm.

Similar pressures from outside and within triggered the major remodels at Briggs. “The increase in the café popularity forced us to increase the size of the kitchen,” Shumila shares. That meant additional equipment, refrigeration, venting, plumbing and more to expand.

Photo courtesy of
Briggs Garden & Home

Photo courtesy of
Briggs Garden & Home

Expect parking pressures, too, whether people sit down to enjoy a meal or grab an espresso and stroll. “We put a lot of effort into creating a space where people love to be. So their car is sitting in the parking lot longer than it would be otherwise,” Murphy says.

While space constraints keep Maypop’s café small for now, a fully operable kitchen and expansion into other parts of the historic house may be ahead — thanks to customer requests.

“We very much value listening to what our customers want and keeping that welcoming culture,” Leek says. “That’s a big component to the day ins and day outs. We listen to what our consumers want, and that helps us evolve and stay fresh. I think that you most definitely have to hear what they have to say because they’re the ones that keep coming back for more.”

Photo courtesy of Mapop
Coffee & Garden Shop

Photo courtesy of Mapop
Coffee & Garden Shop

Expecting challenges and intangible rewards

Shumila spent 12 years as an accountant before joining Briggs in 1994. Not surprisingly, he advises IGCs carefully consider the extraneous expenses that cafés bring. He expects the Briggs café will do $1 million in sales this year — but, of course, revenue and profits are different. “We don’t make a lot of money,” he says.

Beyond lost floor space, he notes extra expenses. For IGCs running all energy-efficient LED lighting, high-draw restaurant equipment will transform utility bills. Restaurant equipment expenses and repair costs can be eye-openers. “I have probably half a dozen pieces of equipment in the basement that no longer work,” he shares, adding that repair costs nearly match new costs.

Trash pickup for the café, which Shumila says generates a surprising amount of trash, must happen multiple times daily. Café floors need washing more often than the rest of the store. That adds up to a lot of overhead and a lot of headaches, he says.

Despite mixed emotions, Shumila says they’ve never discussed closing the café. “I can’t see getting rid of it because we don’t really know what the intangibles are,” he says. “How many people come into the café and then see something and buy it? They come into the café to meet a friend and they’ve never been here before, and now they see this beautiful garden center that they didn’t know was there. It’s hard to know what those numbers are.”

Photo courtesy of Mapop Coffee & Garden Shop

At Maypop, non-gardeners arrive for coffee but end up exploring the garden center. “Then it’s just that curiosity component that keeps you moving about throughout the space when you have that grounding piece, your cup of coffee or tea,” Leek says.

Murphy shares that the Flower House Café has become a stand-alone destination for many people. And new customers often arrive unaware of the garden center next door — helped along when the 40-foot golden chain tree arbor Murphy planted 20 years ago bursts into bloom.

“My philosophy about my garden center is we sell feelings. And as soon as someone walks in the front gate, everything they see, everything they touch, everything they hear, everything they smell has to be beautiful. Period,” she says.

If you’re considering an IGC café, the resounding advice across the board is: Do it all the way or not at all. Your demand for quality and beauty in your IGC flows through to your café and the goods it sells.

The author is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to Garden Center magazine. Reach her at jolene@jolenehansen.com.