Not Your Regular Cup O' Joe

September 15, 2007

By: Eric Gershon

MANCHESTER - When Tim and Kim Hamel were looking to buy a food and beverage franchise, Cuppy's Coffee & More wasn't at the top of their list.

They had never heard of the upstart Florida-based coffee chain until they found it on the Internet about a year and a half ago.

The Bristol couple knew all about Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks, of course - Connecticut, alone, has 405 Dunkin' Donuts, the first of which opened in 1959, and Starbucks has 42 locations here. Its latest Connecticut store opened on Wethersfield Avenue in Hartford last Friday.

But Starbucks doesn't sell franchises, and it's costly to buy into the Dunkin' Donuts family - the Massachusetts-based company requires newcomers to buy at least five stores and only considers applicants with a net worth of $1.5 million or more, a spokesman said.

"We opted for something that we could kind of handle by ourselves," said Tim Hamel, a 42-year-old former software engineer.

So the Hamels bought a Cuppy's for about $160,000, not including remodeling costs, and opened a shop inside the Buckland Hills mall on Aug. 29. It is the first Cuppy's in Connecticut, the second in New England and one of about 40 now open in 18 states, according to the franchiser, which is based in Fort Walton Beach, Fla.

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