Café Amazon Brand Guidelines: A 2002 PTT Forecourt Café, Steel, Brick and Plants

Born inside PTT petrol stations.

Café Amazon began as a coffee counter for drivers. English and Thai Wikipedia both date it to 2002, when the Thai oil and gas group PTT set out to open coffee shops inside its petrol stations. The Thai design magazine art4d, in a feature published in September 2023, places the first branch at the Sricharoenphan PTT station on Vibhavadi Rangsit Road in Bangkok. Bangkok Post reports from 2018 and 2019 give the launch year as 2001. Inside Retail Asia wrote in May 2019 that the chain was founded to serve food and drinks to travellers refuelling at the company’s stations.

The name came from the rainforest. According to art4d, the idea was a green “oasis” for people on long drives, and the word Amazon pointed both to lush nature and to Brazil, a major coffee-growing country that holds much of the forest. English Wikipedia gives the same reasoning. The chain has no connection with the American online retailer that shares the word.

The chain soon left the forecourt. In August 2018 the Bangkok Post reported that Café Amazon was trading as a stand-alone shop in department stores, supermarkets and roadside sites as well as at PTT stations, and counted 2,557 branches, 2,389 of them in Thailand and the rest in Japan, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Oman and the Philippines. Thai Wikipedia says franchising began in 2012, the same year the first branch outside Thailand opened, in Laos, and that most branches are franchised: some are run by petrol-station operators, others by outside franchisees.

Steel, brick, timber and plants.

The shops follow a set of formats rather than a single design. art4d describes four: a kiosk, sold as Café Amazon To Go in Skytrain and subway stations; the standard store, used for most branches; the concept store, with its own design and branch-only menus; and a flagship, which English Wikipedia places beside Ari BTS station in Bangkok.

Standard stores share a palette of materials. art4d lists black steel, exposed steel ceilings, brick or bare concrete walls, timber to soften the industrial finish, and trees and plants to bring the outdoors in; the look was meant to recall a coffee-roasting works. Many branches pair an air-conditioned room with an outdoor terrace, and the magazine reported in 2023 that a gable-roofed glasshouse had become the most common design among new branches because it was quicker to build. Inside, each shop is split into three zones: a working bar where staff prepare drinks and keep stock, a counter for orders, cakes and coffee goods, and a lounge whose seating changes with the site.

The company groups this look under its “Taste of Nature” line. Abroad, art4d notes, branches keep green tones, wood and brick but change their layouts: in Vietnam, desks and upright chairs replace the lounge chairs used in Thailand, and some overseas shops sit inside older buildings. In Singapore, Inside Retail Asia reported in 2019, a matcha latte called Yin Yang was made the signature drink.

Behind the counters sits a supply chain the company runs itself. The Nation reported in May 2025 that the brand buys beans in northern Thailand and has its own roasting plant. Thai Wikipedia places the roastery at Wang Noi, in Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya province, beside a distribution centre, a powder-mixing plant and a bakery that supplies the branches. Café Amazon’s own website lists the same set of buildings: a bean-processing plant, roastery, mixing plant, bakery and distribution centre.

Design and documentation.

Thailand’s restaurant, bakery and café chains tend to present themselves through the places where people meet them: shopping centres, hypermarkets, community malls and their own stand-alone sites. Thai Wikipedia says most MK Suki branches sit in shopping centres and community malls, and in 2015 the Bangkok Post described MK Restaurant Group opening a food mall of its own in Bangkok, London Street, with five of its brands under one roof.

Menus are published by named dishes and drinks rather than by abstract promises. Chains sort their websites into sets, single dishes, desserts and drinks, run seasonal promotions around one dish or sauce, and tie repeat visits to member cards; MK and Yayoi, for example, share the MKONE card. Shopfronts, mascots and packaging are described brand by brand in each guide, as far as dated sources and the companies’ own pages show them.

Ownership is often layered. Several chains in this series sit inside larger groups, among them MK Restaurant Group, PTT OR, the CP group and Food Passion, and some international brands reach Thailand under licence: Yayoi, a Japanese set-meal chain, is run in Thailand by MK Restaurant Group under rights from the Japanese company Plenus, the Bangkok Post reported in 2017. Thai chains also go abroad through franchisees and joint ventures, as MK did in Japan, Vietnam and Singapore.

Corporate pages usually tell a founder story, a list of milestone branches and a record of franchise partners, and listed companies add filings with the Stock Exchange of Thailand. This guide separates what independent, dated sources record (founding dates, owners, listings, branch counts as of a stated date) from what rests only on a company’s own pages, and attributes the latter plainly.

A state-group brand on the stock exchange.

Ownership followed PTT’s restructuring. The Bangkok Post reported in June 2018 that PTT would run a new wholly owned subsidiary, PTT Oil and Retail Business, from 1 July 2018, taking over its petrol stations and non-oil businesses, Café Amazon among them. The company, known as OR, began trading on the Stock Exchange of Thailand on 11 February 2021, the Bangkok Post reported. Thai Wikipedia describes Café Amazon as run by OR, a PTT subsidiary; English Wikipedia describes it as owned by PTT.

Growth abroad came through partners. In December 2019 the Bangkok Post reported a joint venture between OR, with 60%, and Central Restaurants Group, part of Central Plaza Hotel, with 40%, to run the brand in Vietnam. Inside Retail Asia recorded the first two Singapore outlets, at Jewel Changi and Jurong Point, in May 2019, when the brand also traded in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Japan and Oman. The Muscat shop in Oman opened in August 2018, the Bangkok Post reported.

The counts keep rising. Inside Retail Asia wrote that the Jewel Changi shop was the chain’s 2,750th branch in 2019. art4d put the chain at more than 3,800 outlets in Thailand in September 2023. The Nation reported 4,922 outlets worldwide as of April 2025, 4,485 of them in Thailand, and English Wikipedia gives more than 5,000 locations as of October 2025. In November 2025 the company’s news pages announced a Café Amazon concept store in central Phnom Penh.

For a design guide, Café Amazon shows how a forecourt coffee counter can grow into a format system of kiosks, standard shops and concept stores held together by green, timber and steel. Compare Black Canyon Coffee, a Bangkok café-restaurant chain founded in the 1990s, and Starbucks. For this guide we use forest and leaf greens with a roast brown and cream and a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Café Amazon’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.