Freaky Bean retreats
After aggressive start, signs of rollback
By Chris Busby
It looks like The Freaky Bean Coffee Company won’t be expanding into Portland anytime soon.
As detailed in an article in our September 2008 issue, “Coffee battle brewing in Portland,” the upstart roaster charged into the local coffee market a few years ago, aggressively opening new locations and buying up a competitor, Maine Roasters Coffee, that had shops in Falmouth and Yarmouth. With Freaky Beans in every town around Portland, it seemed just a matter of time before the company would enter Portland proper and challenge local favorite Coffee By Design on its home turf.
But in the months since that article appeared, the cup has gone cold. Once confident and eager to tell their story, owners Andrew Kessler and Jonathan Stratton are now incommunicado — repeated efforts to reach them by phone and e-mail have been met with silence. Their marketing manager, Chris Kast, is no longer with the company.
A couple months ago, Freaky Bean sold Maine Roasters Coffee (MRC) back to its original owners, a pair of couples from North Yarmouth and Brunswick, after owning it for about a year. MRC owner Campbell Clegg said she doesn’t know what’s going on with Freaky Bean these days.
Freaky Bean’s changing fortunes have caused an almost comical situation at its location in the Cabela’s complex in Scarborough. Originally opened as a Freaky Bean last May, Kessler and Stratton apparently decided months later that the shop would do better under Maine Roasters Coffee’s brand, so the sign was changed. Now the sign will have to be changed back, but it’s unclear when that will happen.
According to a Dec. 4 article published in The Forecaster, the sign was supposed to have been removed by Dec. 15. It was still up as of yesterday. “I can’t tell you much about it except that we’re trying to get it taken down,” Clegg said last week.
MRC is also trying to regain its Web site. Two months after the company was sold back to its original owners, its site still announces that MRC is part of Freaky Bean, and visitors are redirected to Freaky Bean’s site, which still lists the MRC shops in Falmouth and Yarmouth as being “Freaky Bean owned and operated.” Campbell said she hopes MRC’s site will be corrected this week.
Despite these issues, Freaky Bean has experienced some positive developments of late. This past weekend it opened a new location on Route 1 in Scarborough, in the Bessey Square development across from the town government offices. That location replaces Freaky Bean’s original shop further down Route 1, in the Willowdale Place complex in Scarborough.
In addition to being larger, the Bessey Square Freaky Bean has a drive-thru, as does the shop on Broadway in South Portland, which opened last summer. The addition of drive-thru service makes Freaky Bean more competitive with another major player in the Portland coffee market: Dunkin’ Donuts.
Coffee By Design co-owner Mary Allen Lindemann said she had no comment for this article.
Campbell said she and her fellow owners are glad to be behind the counter again, and have brought back baked goods from two vendors dropped by Freaky Bean: Rosemont Market & Bakery and Tony’s Donut Shop.
