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Key Takeaways Gregorys Coffee has grown from one small Park Avenue bar in 2006 to 53 locations nationwide, with typical stores now doing over $1 million in annual sales.
Revenue reached about $40 million last year and is projected to hit roughly $45 million this year.
Gregorys Coffee founder and CEO Gregory Zamfotis attributes the growth to quality coffee, roasted in-house.
Two decades ago, Gregory Zamfotis was at a crossroads. He was a second-year law student at Brooklyn Law School and had just been offered a full-time position at a real estate law firm. The only problem was that Zamfotis wanted to open his own business.
“I grew up in the food business,” he explains in a new interview with Entrepreneur. “My father operated a number of concepts in New York City, so I grew up working with him.”
Zamfotis worked at his father’s sandwich shop during his time in law school. By the end of his education, he was effectively running the place. He wound up “really enjoying” the work and considering it as a potential career. He knew he wanted to start a business of his own one day, separate from his father’s endeavors. So after graduating from law school, he took his interest and passion for coffee and his experience working in food service, and decided to open his own coffee shop. He was 24 years old.
“If you were in the Midtown Financial District, the areas where the majority of New Yorkers are spending their time working, the only options for coffee really were Starbucks or Dunkin,” Zamfotis says. “I thought that was a huge opportunity because I grew up working there. I wanted to take what I had learned, apply it to the coffee industry, and do it in a part of the city that was extremely underserved at the time.”
Gregory Zamfotis. Credit: Gregorys Coffee
Zamfotis started by opening one coffee bar on Park Avenue and decided it would simply be better than anything around it. The plan was to obsess over the drinks, the ingredients and the feel of the place until it earned a permanent slot in New Yorkers’ daily routines.
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