FINANCE
THIS IS 7 BREW’S WORLD. WE ALL JUST LIVE IN IT.
7 BREW IN SUBURBAN ST. PAUL, WITH ITS SHORTEST LINE OF T PHOTO BY JONATHAN MAZE.
A t just after 3 p.m. on Thursday, workers at a 7 Brew in a suburb north of St. Paul were given a bit of a break by the day’s onslaught of cars through the double drive-thru. That is to say there were only about 20 or so cars there at the time, rather than the line that had extended into the parking lot, down the road, around the corner and into a busy thoroughfare just out front for most of the day. Such lines have been commonplace in the six weeks since the store opened and, if we are being honest, at such openings across the country. A location of the drive-thru beverage chain doesn’t open without these lines. They can generate waits as long as 45 minutes while local officials reconsider traffic flow around the locations and sparking vociferous complaints in places like Springfield, Missouri, Florence, Kentucky or suburban St. Paul. Welcome to 7 Brew’s world. The drive-thru coffee shop chain may well be the biggest phenomenon the restaurant in- dustry has ever seen. The Fayetteville, Arkansas, chain did not exist at the start of 2017. It is already the fourth largest coffee shop chain in the U.S., going from $3 million in sales in 2017 to $1.2 billion last year, according to the Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report, an absurd 111% annual growth rate. Only Crumbl hit the $1 billion mark faster, and 7 Brew is about to surge past the dessert chain on the Top 500 ranking, and it operates in a far more competitive market. 7 Brew, Crumbl and Dave’s Hot Chicken, which was just sold to Roark Capital for $1 billion, were all founded in 2017. The average age for restaurant chains in the Top 100 is 50 years. Only six other chains in the Top 100 have even been founded this century. The coffee chain opened its first stand in Rogers, Arkansas, in 2017. The brand quickly generated a following and grew to seven stands around Arkansas before it was sold in 2020, when John Davidson became the CEO. The brand received an investment from Jamie Coulter and Jimmy John Liautaud in 2021 and from the private-equity firm Blackstone in 2024. We were hearing early on, when the brand had just a few locations, that it was one of the more intriguing growth brands
The Bottom Line: The drive-thru beverage chain has gone from nothing to the country’s fourth-largest coffee chain in less than a decade, and it is just getting started.
JONATHAN MAZE
JONATHAN.MAZE@INFORMA.COM
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RESTAURANT BUSINESS JULY 2026
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