A couple, a coffee and gift shop, and flavoured beans.

Gloria Jean’s began in 1979 in the Chicago area. The Chicago Tribune reported in 2017 that the coffee retailer was “founded by Gloria Jean Kvetko and her husband in 1979 in Chicago”; English Wikipedia places the first shop in Long Grove, a small town outside Chicago, and names the couple as Ed and Gloria Jean Kvetko. The brand’s American website still signs itself “Est. 1979, Chicago, Illinois.”

It started as a small coffee and gift shop, and grew in the United States to more than 50 locations after its franchising rights were bought by Coffee People, a chain from Oregon, according to the company’s American “About us” page as cited by Wikipedia. That page, as archived in 2018, called Gloria Jean’s “the largest mall based retailer of specialty coffees in North America” and said it specialised in flavoured coffees — its own description. Shopping malls were the brand’s early home; Laina Sullivan, of the owner’s US franchise team, told the Tribune in 2017 that mall space had been a focus “in the early days.”

In 1999 Coffee People, and with it the American Gloria Jean’s business, was bought by Diedrich Coffee of Irvine, California; Wikipedia dates the purchase to July 1999. Diedrich, a roaster and wholesaler of coffee beans, then acted as franchisor of both the Coffee People and Gloria Jean’s brands.

The founder was still linked to the brand decades later. In February 2017 the Tribune photographed Gloria Jean Kvetko in front of a Gloria Jean’s Coffees kiosk at Stratford Square Mall in Bloomingdale, one of the mall sites the brand added that year.

Sydney, Diedrich and Retail Food Group.

The brand’s larger second life began in Australia. In 1995 Nabi Saleh and Peter Irvine, a former managing director of the advertising agency DDB Needham, set up Gloria Jean’s Coffees Australia and bought the rights to franchise the brand there from Coffee People, according to the Franchise Council of Australia. Late in 1996 they opened the first Australian Gloria Jean’s at Westfield Miranda in Sydney, followed two weeks later by one at Westfield Eastgardens; the company’s Australian website said in 2009 that it franchised its first store in early 1998 and within six years had 185 stores run by more than 100 franchisees. A store in Darwin in 2003 put the brand in every Australian state and territory, the same history says.

The Australians then bought the brand back from its American owner in stages. In 2004 Gloria Jean’s Coffees Australia acquired the branding and roasting rights for every territory outside the United States and Puerto Rico from Diedrich, and set up Gloria Jean’s Coffees International to run the brand abroad. In 2009 it bought the US and Puerto Rican franchise business as well, giving it the worldwide franchising rights; Diedrich kept the right to use the Gloria Jean’s name in North America for coffee wholesaling and Keurig pods. In December 2009 Green Mountain Coffee Roasters agreed to buy Diedrich for $290 million, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In December 2013 The Australian reported that Yellow Pages Singapore would buy the Australian and international business for A$35.6 million, but the deal fell away. In October 2014 Retail Food Group bought Gloria Jean’s for A$163.5 million, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The coffee category.

The seven brands in this group all sell coffee, and they come from Britain, France, Switzerland, the United States and Italy: Kenco, Carte Noire, Percol, Nescafé, Caribou Coffee, Gloria Jean’s and Caffè Mauro. Coffee brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family roasters that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a café counter to a supermarket shelf.

A coffee brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the cup it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its roastery or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its coffee is actually roasted and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its coffee is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An American name run from Queensland.

Retail Food Group, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and based at Robina on Queensland’s Gold Coast, still lists Gloria Jean’s among its brands, alongside Donut King, Brumby’s and Crust Pizza. It describes itself as Australia’s largest multi-brand retail food franchise owner and as “a roaster and supplier of high-quality coffee products”; English Wikipedia notes that RFG roasts and supplies coffee to its network.

The brand has also tried to grow again in its birthplace. In 2017 the Chicago Tribune reported that Retail Food Group USA planned at least seven new Gloria Jean’s stores — five in northwest Indiana and two in metro Chicago — favouring drive-thrus and street-front sites while still opening some mall kiosks. “It’s so exciting to be here, to bring the brand back; we’re getting the band back together,” Sullivan told the paper. The American website, whose legal line names Gloria Jean’s Gourmet Coffees Corp., calls its stores “Flavor Famous” and says the company sources its own 100% Arabica beans, designs its own blends and produces its own roasts; these are the company’s claims. In Australia the brand’s website offers franchises and mobile “Gloria Jean’s Vans” for events.

The name has a near-twin: Gloria Jeans is also the name of a Russian clothing retailer, which is unrelated to the coffee chain.

For a design guide, Gloria Jean’s shows how a brand name can travel further than the company that created it, and come home under new owners. Compare Costa Coffee, another coffee-shop brand built across many countries, and Caribou Coffee, another American coffeehouse chain now owned by an international group. For this guide we use mocha, berry red and steamed milk with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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