VIENNA'S JULIUS MEINL WALTZES INTO U.S.
CHICAGO LOCATION IS COFFEE PURVEYOR'S FIRST STATESIDE FORAY
BY TIM ROSTAN, CBS.MARKETWATCH.COM
CHICAGO (CBS.MW)

The team bringing Vienna's venerable Julius Meinl to the United States is putting a 140-year-old brand name squarely on the line but taking few chances.

When coffee roaster and retailer Meinl opens its first stateside location -- and its first outside Europe -- next month, the brew and the coffeehouse atmosphere are meant to be virtual duplicates of their Viennese counterparts. To accomplish that feat, Meinl has had the interior prebuilt in Austria and shipped to Chicago. A pair of packaging technologies safeguards the beans.

"If what we do is successful, then we could go to the equity markets," said Thomas Meinl, who, along with his brother Julius IV, represents the fourth of five generations of Meinls in the family business. He cited the success of IBM and other technology giants in developing new concepts apart from the parent company's umbrella. "It's the only way to start and seed a new operation," he said.

Café society

It's tempting to view Meinl's U.S. incursion as returning fire on Seattle-based Starbucks, whose opening salvo consisted of a handful of locations in Julius Meinl's hometown (a step that the BBC, Britain's Guardian and The New York Times all likened to carrying coals to Newcastle), the birthplace of Central Europe's Kaffeehaus culture and one of the globe's most coffee-devoted cities.

The logo, incidentally, has been reworked for U.S. consumption, with the majority of the pigment having been drained from the more traditional "coffee boy" face. "We wanted to be politically correct," conceded Thomas Meinl.

Meinl hastened to add that the coffee boy's countenance had not been carved in stone upon creation in 1924. The image has "changed, actually, constantly," he said, and the version at the especially upmarket Meinl am Graben in central Vienna is monochromatically gold from fez to pointy collar.

While well-traveled U.S. consumers may be acquainted with the Julius Meinl name, the Meinl team is not taking its reputation for granted: Trifold pamphlets linking Julius Meinl to coffeehouses' robust history are being finalized for distribution in Chicago. Eleventh-hour revisions were sent by e-mail to the printer in Austria early this week.

Beans from Wien

The roasted coffee Meinl shelves alongside the teas, jams and gourmet goods at the Chicago store will have been roasted and vacuum packaged in Austria (employing a valve for whole beans and valveless packaging for ground coffee, which will have been allowed to release gases before being sheathed in foil), then whisked to Chicago, via Washington, by Austrian Airlines and United Airlines.

"Without modern technology, creating what we're creating would have been not only difficult but impossible," said Thomas Meinl. But, that aside, what Meinl and company must sell Americans is their products and, at least as significantly, a taste of Mitteleuropa.

Will they linger for hours, discussing big ideas, as the Viennese famously have done? Perhaps not, especially in light of Thomas Meinl's observation that even the Viennese rarely do that anymore -- "except maybe businesspeople," noted Vienna-based Christian Glueck, liaison to the Chicago team from headquarters.

What Chicagoans will find, according to Meinl, is a hybridized operation: It is meant to look very much like a Viennese coffeehouse (if constructed inside a newly built condominium block). It will feature leather-upholstered benches, suspended lighting and free newspapers (but also a fast-food-style section). And coffee will be delivered to customers' tables in the Viennese manner, on small, rectangular silver trays with small glasses of water (but will also be served in to-go paper cups).

Mein Chicagoans

Thomas Meinl said Chicago was specifically chosen for Meinl's first U.S. shop because it's the de facto capital of the country's heartland and is home to a "broad middle-income group who like fine products, gourmet products." While East Coast cities have more intact ties to Western Europe and the West Coast is more Asia-centric, Meinl continued, Midwesterners are willing to give a new arrival a chance.

Maybe. Or the explanation for Meinl's arrival in Chicago could be, like its having landed in a neighborhood that was established as a heavily Teutonic suburb, mere happenstance.

If it is just an accident, and if the New York Times restaurant reviewer William Grimes is on the mark, local coffee fans will find it to be a happy one. In a review of Café Sabarsky in Manhattan, which brews up Meinl coffee, Grimes wrote this: "I'm prepared to state that it's the best coffee in the city: rich, robust and deep."

For their initiation, coffee aficionados outside Chicago may be in for a wait. Playing it close to the vest, Thomas Meinl said that a "small cluster [of Meinl locations] around Chicago" would likely follow the first Chicago store, and only then, if successful, would Meinl branch out to "a few of the other big cities."

With that in mind, a great deal of focus remains on Austria, of course, but also Hungary; Germany; Poland and the Czech Republic, where the company operates supermarkets; Slovenia; and elsewhere in the region. When tensions are deemed to have cooled sufficiently in the war-ravaged Balkans, suggested Thomas Meinl, additional states in the former Yugoslavia would be fertile ground.

If Julius Meinl's expansion on its home continent leads to more than one skirmish with Starbucks over Middle European turf, Thomas Meinl pronounced, so be it: "We'll see how successful they are."

TIM ROSTAN IS ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR FOR CBS.MARKETWATCH.COM IN CHICAGO.

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