Coffee shops are no longer the exclusive province of struggling artists, bohemian musicians, and louche students.
Increasingly, they’re a workspace situated somewhere between office and home.
This is one of the changes in the retail coffee business that has caused coffeehouse culture to flourish in the Toledo area. It’s a culture that’s celebrated by Destination Toledo’s annual Coffee Quest 419, which began in 2018 with 12 participating coffee shops and now includes 29 throughout the Toledo metropolitan area.
Coffee Quest 419
Think of Coffee Quest 419 as a scavenger hunt for the best coffee in town. Participants can register for their digital passport to the area’s caffeinated venues at VisitToledo.org/CoffeeQuest419.
Beginning March 15, the passport will let people scan a QR code at each coffee shop to document their presence there. Those who visit the majority of the 29 coffeehouses will be rewarded with a Coffee Quest 419 T-shirt designed by local graphic designer Alyson Krajewski and printed by Jūpmode, one of the event’s sponsors. Other prizes include a Coffee Quest 419 sticker and a keychain. Truly hardcore coffee fans who hit all of the participating coffeehouses will be entered in a drawing for grand prizes consisting of baskets of caffeinated goodies from the coffee shops themselves.
The event runs until June 15.
One of the coffee shops participating in this year’s event is the Bard’s Coffee, a long, narrow venue on Louisiana Avenue in Perrysburg that combines antique decor with state-of-the art fixtures and equipment. Squint a little and you can imagine owner Chris Watson as an early 20th century soda jerk — albeit one who’s steaming up a latte rather than mixing a vanilla phosphate.
But it’s unlikely that any old-time soda jerk ever installed a 220-volt dual-head brewer or a two-stage five-micron water filtration system like Mr. Watson did.
“Coffee is 99 percent water,” he said. And he credits the many customer comments he receives about the great taste of his coffee to his insistence on using the purest water possible.
But technology isn’t the only thing that’s changed in the coffee shop business. The customer base has changed as well.
“Our customers come in three categories,” Mr. Watson said. “There are the people who live close to downtown Perrysburg. Then there are the visitors, the people who come to the farmers market or come to the area occasionally to shop. And then there are the business customers — the fastest growing segment.”
Mr. Watson further subdivides the businessmen who come to the Bard’s Coffee into two types.
“We get a lot of solo laptop users in the afternoons, but now we’re encouraging people to come here for face-to-face meetings,” he said. “The tables are very popular for those folks.”
He discreetly pointed out three tables, each occupied by two people.
“Those are business meetings,” he said.
An old coffeehouse culture is new again
It’s not surprising that coffee shops have once again become places to conduct business. After all, the institution that later became the New York Stock Exchange started in early 1793 in the Tontine Coffeehouse, which was located on Wall Street.
One English traveler observed in 1807 that “the Tontine Coffee House was filled with underwriters, brokers, merchants, traders, and politicians; selling, purchasing, trafficking, or insuring; some reading, others eagerly inquiring the news.”
Perhaps very little has actually changed since then.
At Brew Coffee Bar, located near the southeast corner of the University of Toledo campus, manager Josie Kennedy sees business conducted and work being done every day.
“There are several people who work online here,” she said. “They have a place here that’s separate from their home, but they don’t have to rent an office. There’s an engineer who works online here almost every day. And a lot of professors come in to do grading. A couple of lawyers meet with their clients here.
“We don’t resent people who camp out here to work. We’re not going to chase you out. Almost everyone who comes here does spend money, but you can stay here for hours and hours. Sometimes people have business meetings here — and we have a meeting space they don’t have to pay to use.”
Ms. Kennedy notes that Brew is also frequented by more traditional coffeehouse customers. It’s home to a group of medical students who sit and study together. Book clubs meet there. And many students come in to do their homework and work on school projects.
“It’s a space almost like the college library used to be,” she said.
Coffeehouses adapt to their new role
As much as independent coffeehouses may hate the fact, it was Starbucks that pioneered the rebirth of the notion that coffee shops lend themselves to being places where business is conducted.
Before he started his own social media marketing agency, Jayson Hines ran several Toledo-area Starbucks.
“What Starbucks taught us is that coffee shops are the ‘third place,’ a location between home and the workplace,” he said. “They drilled that into our heads.”
One of the things the giant coffee chain did to entice people to conduct business from Starbucks outlets was to offer free unlimited Wi-Fi. At the time, other venues limited the amount of time people could use the internet connection.
“Everyone knew that at Starbucks, the Wi-Fi was good and the bathrooms were clean,” Mr. Hines remembers. “Back in the day, we even had a guy who would bring his printer with him and work from the store.”
According to Mr. Hines, a coffeehouse needs three things to succeed: vibe, service, and coffee. One of his favorite coffee spots, Queen Bee & Honey, has all three and is a great place for talking business. At one point, the coffeehouse, which is uniquely situated inside Hoen’s Garden Center in Springfield Township, hosted a networking meeting of 40 to 50 people that Mr. Hines organized.
And he is far from the only person conducting business there.
“We have a lot of people holding meetings here or coming to work themselves,” said Bree Wrozek, the operating partner at Queen Bee & Honey. “And now that we’ve started offering food, we’ve seen an uptick in that activity. We have a few Realtors come in to meet with clients. We have marketing and networking people who bring their clients here and stay for hours.”
With 29 local coffeehouses participating in Coffee Quest 419 over a three-month period, people who are looking for a place to get their work done will not want for choice.
Caleigh Heuring, the director of marketing and communications at Destination Toledo, summed up the goals of the event this way.
“Ultimately, we want Coffee Quest 419 to be about supporting small businesses in our area, discovering new places, and connecting people to Toledo and each other through something they love — which is coffee,” she said.
First Published February 28, 2025, 12:59 p.m.
