Bridgehead Coffee

Bridgehead was formed in Toronto, Ontario, originally as Bridgehead Trading, in 1981, by two United Church ministers and two social activists who were concerned with small-scale coffee farmers in Nicaragua.[3]

Bridgehead was the first company to offer Canadian consumers fairly traded coffee, as a group of volunteers sold coffee from the basements of churches in Toronto. The business grew rapidly and was soon acquired by Oxfam Canada in 1984.[3]

Under Oxfam Canada, Bridgehead became a formally incorporated, for-profit company. Oxfam Canada's aim was not to focus on the coffee that Bridgehead was funded and grew from, but to bring in a more diverse fair-trade product line. This eventually led to a decrease in profits and eventually a dip into losses.[3] A profile of Bridgehead's post-Oxfam management in the Ottawa Citizen claimed that Oxfam Canada's Bridgehead ultimately failed in the mid-1990s due in part to a "lack of sound business practices."[4]

In May 1998, Bridgehead was acquired by Shared Interest. This U.K. based lending society held the Bridgehead name in hopes of finding a buyer. Shared Interest only needed to hold the name for a year as in 1999; an offer arrived from Tracey Clark.[3]

Clark wanted to restore Bridgehead to its former status as a fair-trade coffee and tea company. In April 2000, Bridgehead Inc. was formed, and on June 17, 2000, the first Bridgehead Coffeehouse opened at 362 Richmond Road in Westboro, Ottawa, Ontario.[3] Clark originally relied on financing from family and friends, but by 2002, Bridgehead was owned by 30 investors.[5] Also in 2002, Clark opened a central kitchen to serve Bridgehead's line of food products. [6] Bridgehead expanded from one outlet in 2000[7] to nine by 2008,[8] and currently operates twenty outlets, requiring the company to provide calorie counts for all of its food products.[9][10]

June 2012 marked the opening of Bridgehead's own roastery, which is now where all of the coffee that is sold by the company is roasted.[3] A further development is the introduction of alcohol to Bridgeheads beverage lineup. In July 2015, According to the reports, Bridgehead Coffee opened a 1,850-square-foot location in a six-storey office at the corner of Pinecrest road and Iris Street.[11] As of September 2015, select Bridgehead locations began to offer beer from local breweries Beau's and Beyond the Pale, as well as wine and coffee-inspired cocktails.[12] In 2017, Bridgehead began working with Carleton University's Mass Spectrometry Centre to uncover answers about how coffee beans age on a cellular level.[13]

In December 2019, the company announced it was being sold to Aegis Brands, parent company of the Second Cup coffee chain.

Bridgehead Coffee has 20 locations in the Ottawa region.[9]

• List of coffeehouse chains

• Bridgehead's history
• Bridgehead Coffee