Beyu Caffe – Durham

Founded in Durham in 2009, Beyu Caffe has been rooted in a love for coffee, community and bringing people together in a place where they can simply be themselves. Risk mitigation strategies for small businesses rarely have incorporated a global pandemic, but like most food and beverage businesses, Beyu Caffe found itself having to navigate the uncertainties brought on by COVID-19.

Thanks to a NC COVID-19 Rapid Recovery Loan, they were able to regroup and focus their efforts on service and scale their business to meet the needs of their customers.

“Thread Capital provided the needed breathing room for us to weather the storm during COVID, and not have to make drastic decisions that could have permanently hurt our business,” Beyu Caffé said. “We were able to utilize the funds to continue paying our team members while we continued to build our business. We were also able to invest in the launch of our e-commerce website to push our retail beans online.”

But Beyu did not stop there, through partnerships with Downtown Durham’s emergency alliance between small businesses, owner Dorian Bolden launched the Beyu Food Project. The initiative started following the pandemic onset to help support first responders and essential workers but quickly evolved into a meal delivery program for seniors, food insecure families and those in need of medically trained nutrition.

“As we were providing school meals, family meals, senior meals, we realized there was a real demand out there to tackle food insecurity,” Dorian Bolden, CEO and Chief Vision Officer for the Beyu Group told Spectrum News last July.

As of July 28, Beyu Food Project served 268,000 individual meals. Recently, Bolden and his team were able to acquire a location to open a commercial kitchen where they are able to cook meals on a larger scale, not only for the food project, but for their catering and grab-and-go services.

As they continue to scale and grow their business, Beyu Caffe cites the ease of the Thread Capital experience as a factor in their success.

“The Thread Capital experience was streamlined and easy,” Beyu Caffe told us. “Because of limited time during the heart of COVID in order to maintain our business operation, we greatly appreciated the ease of working with Thread Capital.”