Born by Jan Barthe Cuatrecasas and four other partners, GoodNews has raised 15 million with investors such as Thomas Meyer (Desigual) and Javier Rubió (Barlon Capital).
At the intersection between Carrer de Balmes and Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona was the newsstand, where the founders of the GoodNews chain have already turned into the first of 30 coffee (and other products) stalls. They bought the concession ferran, the newsagent running it, for 30,000 euros. And he “bought a motorcycle and went touring the Peninsula and Morocco.” He sold, believing that “people don’t shop at newsagents in the 21st century.” that’s how he tells Jan Barthe CuatrecasasCEO and co-founder of GoodNews.
Barthe and four other friends –Fernando Conde, Alexander Catasus, Ignacio Campos And Lucas Gispert– When they decided to start a venture on their own in September 2020, they were involved in an external project and were paralyzed by the pandemic. They set out to modernize traditional newsstands and transform them into others where takeaway coffee is the center of attention. The concept of fast coffee, which attracts more and more young and busy people who run to the streets with their freshly served coffee in a cardboard cup.
At that first kiosk in Barcelona, the five members spent a month handing out coffee in exchange for customers giving them good news; it was part of an attractive—and perfectly studied—marketing strategy; The newspaper was one of the few activities permitted by recognizing access to information as a fundamental right. For this action, the firm was renamed GoodNews.
first level
But the company didn’t get off the ground just by purchasing a kiosk license. Three investment rounds were undertaken to create the brand, which are located in Barcelona, Madrid and Paris, raising a total of €15m, 11 of which close in 2022 in the third round. It included the participation of Thomas Meyer, creator of the Desigual brand, and Barlon Capital, the venture capital fund of Javier Rubió.
Also, GoodNews, Manuel Puig of Puig; Antonio Gallardo of Almirall Laboratories; and Rafael Esteve, director of Danone. And this barthe He owes his second surname to the Cuatrecasas family, the founder of the prestigious law firm of the same name, where he worked for a period and closed the 2022 fiscal year with a turnover of 352.66 million euros.
“We compete with the big coffee brands, but our prices are much more competitive. We’re our own brand and we’re very focused on young people who feel more identified with GoodNews than Starbucks,” he says. barthe.
The coffee they sell comes from Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Costa Rica. Although they sell coffee beans as well as other types of beverage and food products and multivitamins. In these regions, they buy the product “35 to 45% more expensive than detected”. “We’re eating the profit margin,” he says. “Coffee farmers have told us that there is a problem with child labor in these countries.”They take children to the fields, to work, instead of taking them to school from far away.We took on the challenge of being the first coffee company to be able to guarantee a child-labor free coffee. We pay them more to employ workers other than their children. And we have local watchdogs who assure it.” They can do this because they save on staff – there’s only one worker per shift – and their stores are so small, they only do takeout.
epidemic memories
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The five friends sold the coffee themselves for four months until they hired the first worker in December. And they still remember some of the good news that the locals gave them in exchange for a cup of coffee. “People who find a job after losing their job due to the pandemic or recover from the coronavirus in complex circumstances,” the CEO says. Novice project closed 2021 It has a turnover of 1 million euros and has not yet made public its accounts for the past year.
After three years of operation, the firm is very clear about its growth plans. In the short term, it wants to become “the brand with the most takeaway coffee places in Paris” and land in Amsterdam as well. In the middle, around 2026, Major cities in Europe. The CEO concludes his words by saying, “We must be a reference brand for new generations in the European market.”