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"Now - Those are grounds to celebrate!"
by Allison Bray, Staff Reporter
Front Page-Winnipeg Free Press
August 29,1997
A little piece of Winnipeg will soon be waiting for diners in restaurants and coffee shops around the world, thanks to the Internet and Winnipeg entrepreneur Jean Daum. Her creation, The Coffee News, is a bright and cheery advertising flyer featuring lighthearted news, trivia questions, horoscopes and local events.
Most Winnipeggers will recognize it as the brown-coloured ad flyer that's delivered once a week to local restaurants for solo diners to pore over as they eat or sip coffee. But few know that what started off as a cottage industry run out of the former ballroom dancing instructor's Charles wood apartment is now a million dollar, multinational business.
Daum, 46, boasts a franchise operation with 170 Coffee News publications in Canada, 270 in the United States, 54 in the United Kingdom and five in the Republic of Ireland. She is also poised to sell the rights to her publication to buyers in Israel, Indonesia, Mexico and India as well as other exotic locales in between.
(Now in South Africa! Happy to announce) Inserted by the proud South Africans.
Sights set on a world record
Aside from hoping to have Coffee News publications in cafes and restaurants throughout the world, she is also setting her sights on having the publication listed in the Guinness World Book Records as the world's most popular restaurant publication. Not bad for an idea spawned by that awkward feeling of boredom and self-consciousness some people get when dining alone. "When I would go out to a restaurant, I'm reading the sugar packets," Daum said from her Winnipeg home. "You're twiddling your thumbs and staring at people." So instead of trying to rustle up dining companions, Daum came up with the idea for Coffee News.
The publication is fun, easy to read and can be held in one hand while you eat or drink, she said. Daum drew upon previous publishing experience as editor and publisher of the Charleswood Consumer Guide and The Suburban community papers, which folded in the mid-1980s. After six months of research into advertising and marketing, Daum launched the first Coffee News in 1988 and began distributing it to restaurants in St. Vital. The flyer was so successful, Daum said she soon had requests for it to be shipped up to Thompson, after a local Pizza Hut that started carrying it. Since then, the business has mushroomed, thanks to her Web site on the Internet encouraging others to purchase the rights to the publication.
Daum now employs two full-time Winnipeg writers - her friend and former truck driver Tony Farrer and Winnepeg freelance writer Lorna Wenger - who compile and write the trivia and Everybody 's Talking! news bits. She also has enlisted a writer in Manchester, England, to put a British in on news stories for the U.K. Coffee News publications.
While licensees in other countries will translate stories into their own languages, Daum also carries French versions of the publication in Quebec, under the name Pause Cafe. She is also expecting a Spanish version out soon.
The concept is simple.
For a reasonable one-time fee, licensees are entitled to use the Coffee News format and content, which they retrieve over the Internet. In exchange, they support the publication through local advertising from small businesses.
Note: The upfront fee is subject to change and you need to Contact Us for the latest info.
At last South Africans can also share the success of Coffee News.
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