The menu is fixed to the building, easily viewed as you wait behind the coffee customer ahead of you. You enter from Garfield Street and follow the curving driveway (quite close to 360 degrees) to the covered area beside the sliding window. The structure that now houses Cuppa Joe Drive Thru used to be a bank, and it still has that quirky feel of a drive-through where you might once have deposited your checks. But I’ve also learned that it’s not always possible to be 100 percent, and I’ve learned to be OK with that, and to just keep persevering,” Sandi says. Her questions did rattle me, and wake me up. “Being a fledgling business and not entrenched in the culinary world, I was finding my own way. She would suffer alongside her farmers the loss of a key crop of lettuce or tomatoes, and scramble to make other arrangements to fill the needs of her lunch menu. In the early years she would have over a dozen suppliers of various items. Alice pushed Sandi to consider working as locally as possible, and that has been a mission and focus of Sandi’s management of Cuppa Joe ever since. Sandi knew of her, but didn’t recognize her when Alice started asking her “Alice Waters kind of questions” about where she purchased her ingredients and from whom and why. Bob brought his sister-in- law, Alice Waters, owner and creator of the renowned restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, and an early advocate of working with local farmers and producers, to the coffee shop. It was through Bob that Sandi experienced an early epiphany. We grew up with all of those cool things happening, all these artisan things happening, including Bob Pisor at Stonehouse Bakery.” The potential was there, but it was only just starting to emerge. “When I first moved here, Front Street had a lot of empty storefronts. “Our history kind of lines up with the growth of Traverse City into a food and drink mecca,” Sandi says. As soon as local coffee roasters first emerged in Northern Michigan, Sandi switched from the Seattle imports to buying locally, first in Beulah, then from Roaster Jack out on East Silver Lake Road-owned and run by Jack and Sarah Davis, who worked at Cuppa Joe as they developed and manifested their business plan.
Sandi and her then-husband, Shayne Daley, purchased the original Cuppa Joe Drive Thru from Jean Peltola, who had been influenced by the growing coffee culture in her former home in Seattle. We jumped on the chance to work with her right away.” We were one of the first shops here in Building 50, and Angela was taking classes down the hall at Yoga for Health. “We offer Angela’s Light of Day teas, and were possibly her first retail customer. As advised by local tea master and founder of Light of Day Organics, Angela Macke, Sandi is careful not to put her matcha into dairy milk, nor will she heat it.) (For the record, matcha latte is not a trend she will follow. Apparently current trends in the industry include drink alternatives to coffee such as green matcha lattes and smoothies and golden milk infused with turmeric and other spices. She also attended owner/administrator workshops covering management, retaining good employees, new tips and trends. Sandi is just back from the Coffee Fest in Tacoma, Washington, where she was able to hobnob with her peers and test-run state-of-the-art equipment to replace some of the older pieces in her shops. At 17 and 20-plus years respectively, both locations have grown into local hubs for coffee drinks, tea and baked treats the café also offers home-cooked breakfast and lunch fare. That is where I found myself to talk with Sandi Daley, sole owner of both Cuppa Joe businesses-this café and the Cuppa Joe Drive Thru on the other end of town at Garfield and East Front Street. There are few places in Traverse City more cheery on a wintry, blustery morning than inside Cuppa Joe Café, looking out on the gray skies and whirling snow flurries from a comfortable chair in the semi-classic diner, with the grounds of the surrounding Grand Traverse Commons and spires of historic Building 50 as a backdrop.
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