Business View - January 2016 45
news stories, and of course, the advertisements. It is
a quick read for people while they are waiting for food
or other types of consumer service.
Bill Buckley of Bangor, Maine, a former retail banker, is
the President of Coffee News, which now has approxi-
mately 800 franchises worldwide and Head Offices in
New Zealand, Australia, Poland, Spain, Namibia, Cana-
da, Mexico, Slovenia, and Venezuela. He recounts the
early days of the company, how he came to be associ-
ated with the brand, and where he sees it going and
growing in the future.
“Coffee News was created by a lady in Winnipeg, Man-
itoba, by the name of Jean Daum,” he begins. “She
was in the newspaper business and published some
weekly, community newspapers. For a variety of rea-
sons, she had gone bankrupt with those papers, large-
ly due to some Canadian postal law changes. She was
unemployed for about six months and decided that
she needed to create a new type of publication. She
couldn’t afford to mail it to everyone’s home, due to
the cost of postage, so she looked for another way to
distribute it.”
The story goes that while Daum was placing a lunch
order at her favorite café one day, she found herself
reading the nutritional information on a sugar packet
to pass the time before her food arrived. The thought
occurred to her that restaurant patrons would be prime
users of something – anything - that was available and
quick to read while they, too, waited for service. “So,
she came up with the idea of Coffee News and created
it as a restaurant publication,” Buckley explains. “Res-
taurants have several hundred patrons a week and, in
some cases, several thousand. Initially, she did all of
the writing, she did all of the ad sales, she designed
all of the ads, she formatted it, she took it to the local
print shop and they ran off 13 separate editions for
the city of Winnipeg, which is a city of about 600,000
people. And then she hand distributed it to restaurants
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
Coffee News
WHAT:
The world’s #1 restaurant publication
WHERE:
World headquarters in Bangor, Maine
WEBSITE
:
FRANCHISE
