Why C Market Coffee Keeps Going Big When Everyone Else Goes Small
A conversation with Bridgette Hyun, founder of C Market Coffee, on building destination cafés, training the next generation of baristas, and her favourite café
This is part of the Coffee Founders series is where café owners, roasters, coffee experts share with us their best stories and insights.
If you’ve visited Paris in the last six months, you’ll notice a pattern among the new wave of Asian-influenced cafés: they’re small, seating is scarce, and when you do find a chair you’re sitting close enough to your neighbour to hear their conversation. Yet the coffee is very good, so people queue anyway.
So when I came across C Market Coffee in the local Vancouver press and saw a Korean-influenced café doing the exact opposite; massive spaces, generous seating, room to spread out, I was curious enough to chase down an interview.
After a few false starts around Bridgette’s schedule, we finally got on a call, and I got to hear the story behind C Market: her path from a single Q-grader’s passion project to a four-location company, and why she keeps building bigger rooms while the rest of the specialty coffee world builds smaller ones.
C Market takes its name from the global Arabica commodity exchange, the system that ultimately sets the price of coffee at its most basic level. For Bridgette, that’s the point: no matter how polished the café or how creative the menu, everything is built on the quality of the raw ingredient.
“I’ve always believed that no matter how beautiful a café is, or how creative the menu becomes, everything is built on the quality of the raw ingredients,” she told me. “It starts from the source.” Naming the brand after the exchange was a way of building that philosophy in from the foundation up.
As the brand has grown, the letter has taken on a second meaning. The “C” now stands for four pillars; Coffee, Culture, Connection, and Community, and “Market” points to the exchange of ideas and people the space is meant to hold. It’s also where the company’s slogan comes from: where every sip sparks connection.
