The line for Buddy Brew stretched past black-and-gold balloons and into Sprouts Farmers Market, where shoppers pushed carts past customers waiting beneath the coffee company’s gray hanging sign. Buddy Brew founders Dave and Susan Ward stood behind a wide yellow ribbon with Sprouts employees, their arms raised beneath metallic stars as the opening-day crowd pressed around the new café.
Buddy Brew spent 16 years building eight cafés around Tampa Bay; then one Sprouts deal put 10 more on the calendar in a matter of months. Six are already open — Westchase, Valrico, New Tampa, Seminole, South Tampa and Riverview — with Carrollwood, Palm Harbor, Trinity and South Sarasota coming this fall.
“The response has been incredibly encouraging,” said Dave Ward, Buddy Brew’s CEO and co-founder. “With each opening, we’re meeting new customers who are discovering Buddy Brew for the first time, while also seeing longtime guests excited to have us closer to where they live and shop.”
Sprouts had tried the same idea before Buddy Brew, bringing Southern California’s Klatch Coffee and Arizona’s PRESS Coffee into its stores before choosing a Florida partner. The relationship with Buddy Brew already went back several years: Sprouts began carrying the Tampa company’s canned BOLT cold brew across its stores in 2022, putting Buddy Brew on grocery shelves well beyond Florida before putting its cafés inside Florida stores.
More Americans are getting coffee away from home, too, with 38% of past-day coffee drinkers having at least some prepared somewhere else — the highest share since January 2020, according to National Coffee Association research released this month. Specialty coffee also set a record, with 48% of American adults drinking it the previous day.
Getting in front of those customers is becoming harder through the traditional coffee-shop model, with growth across the $58.5 billion U.S. branded market slowing to 4.2% during the latest year measured by World Coffee Portal, down from 5.1% a year earlier. The country still has 45,227 branded coffee shops across 588 brands, but higher coffee costs, inflation, tariffs and consumers watching what they spend have made the next storefront a more expensive bet.
Some of the biggest coffee companies have already found another way in, with Starbucks putting cafés inside grocery stores, airports, hotels, hospitals and college campuses — places where people can buy coffee without making a separate trip to a traditional Starbucks. Buddy Brew has some history with the smaller version of that model, too, from operating the coffee bar inside Oxford Exchange to squeezing one of its own cafés into just 2,000 square feet at Park Tower.
Sprouts takes that idea much farther, putting Buddy Brew inside stores where the grocery traffic already exists while Buddy Brew hires the people behind the counter. The cafés are not simply smaller copies of its standalone shops, either, with Sprouts-only items including smoothies, specialty drinks and avocado and fig toasts joining the espresso and cold brew menu.
The deal has also carried Buddy Brew farther around Tampa Bay, with Seminole becoming its first Pinellas County café and Trinity set to do the same in Pasco this fall. For a company whose packaged coffee already reaches more than 1,000 grocery stores, Sprouts moves Buddy Brew from the shelf to the counter — and puts its employees in front of shoppers who may never have walked into one of its cafés.
“Opening this many cafés in such a short period of time has been a major undertaking, but the response has reinforced how much opportunity there is for Buddy Brew throughout the region,” Ward said. “We’re learning with every opening, reaching new neighborhoods and continuing to build on what has already been a great partnership with Sprouts.”
Dave and Susan Ward began with a small garage roaster in South Tampa, leaving $10 bags by the front door for friends who dropped money into a box. More friends wanted coffee, more bags went out the front door and by 2010 the Wards needed somewhere they could legally roast and sell wholesale, so they rented 650 square feet on Kennedy Boulevard.
The night before opening, the Wards realized they had forgotten a cash register, so they peeled the label from a coffee can, set it on the counter and trusted customers to drop $2 inside. Dave and Susan brewed in the morning, roasted and packed coffee through the afternoon and made deliveries at night, sometimes chasing customers onto Kennedy Boulevard with free cups when somebody wandered in while the roaster was running.
What started in the garage now employs more than 200 people, distributes coffee nationwide and brings in more than $10 million a year, with the Tampa roastery and cold-brew plant supplying a café business growing faster than it ever has before. Buddy Brew will mark National Coffee Day on Tuesday by giving away free small brewed coffees all day at every café, with no purchase required.
“When Susan and I started roasting coffee 16 years ago, we never imagined Buddy Brew would grow into what it is today,” Ward said. “To walk into these new cafés and see people gathering around something that started so small is pretty remarkable. We’re incredibly grateful for the way these communities have welcomed us.”