Artcaffé Brand Guidelines: A 2008 Westgate Café, Dormans in 2014 & ECP in 2018

A bakery café in a Nairobi mall.

Artcaffé — the company writes it as one word with an accented final e, though Kenyan newspapers often print it as ArtCaffe — opened its first restaurant in 2008 at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, according to Capital FM in April 2022 and the trade title Food Business Africa in December 2021. Its main format, which it calls Artcaffé Coffee & Bakery, combines a bakery, a coffee shop, a bar and a sit-down restaurant; Capital FM described it in 2022 as both a full-service and an on-the-move bakery, with grab-and-go counters beside the dining rooms. Its website invites guests for breakfast, lunch, dinner or a coffee break.

The chain grew slowly at first. In January 2014 Capital FM reported that Artcaffé had bought seven outlets belonging to Dormans, the Kenyan coffee-house chain, a deal that the station said would take Artcaffé from four outlets — at the Galleria, the Junction, Thika Road Mall and Village Market — to eleven, and give it sites at Yaya Centre, Karen and City Mall in Mombasa where Dormans had traded.

Much of what makes the chain work happens behind the counter. The Standard reported in December 2018 that the group ran a bakery, kitchen and logistics centre that supplied its restaurants, and Food Business Africa described in 2021 a central bakery and kitchen sending baked goods, food and drink to its outlets every day.

ECP and a run of openings.

On 19 December 2018 the private equity firm Emerging Capital Partners (ECP) announced that it had acquired a majority stake in Artcaffé Group, The Standard reported the following day. The paper said ECP had not disclosed the price of what it called a “substantial majority” stake, that Artcaffé then ran 26 outlets in Nairobi, and that the deal came a year after ECP sold its stake in Java House to Abraaj Group. Food Business Africa still described the group as owned by ECP in December 2021, when it named Sagi Vaknin as chief executive.

The group had about 1,300 staff in December 2021, Food Business Africa reported. The years that followed brought new formats. The group launched an online market delivery service in 2020 and opened its first gourmet food store in Kileleshwa in 2021, Food Business Africa reported; in December 2021 it opened a second, the 8,000-square-foot Artcaffé Market at Rhapta Square in Westlands, with a butchery, pantry, fresh produce, homeware, flowers and a wine cellar alongside a restaurant and rooftop bar. The same month brought outlets at Shell petrol stations on Nairobi’s Northern and Eastern bypasses.

Its biggest Nairobi café, according to Capital FM in April 2022, was the two-floor, 14,000-square-foot outlet in Britam Tower in Upper Hill, opened in December 2021 with a private terrace for events. Counts vary by source and date: Food Business Africa said in December 2021 that the group had more than 50 outlets across Nairobi, while Capital FM counted 36 stores in April 2022. In October 2023 Business Daily Africa reported that a new market at Village Market — with a butchery, a bakery counter, ready meals, fresh fruit and vegetables, a wine cellar and a wine-tasting room, aimed at shoppers in Gigiri, Runda and Kitisuru — was its fifth full-scale market store and ninth market outlet overall, counting four mini-markets.

Shopfronts, menus and owners.

Africa’s restaurant and café chains present themselves through a small set of public surfaces: the shopfront and its signage, the menu with its named dishes, the delivery and loyalty apps, and the corporate pages that explain who founded a brand and who owns it now. Several of the groups in this guide run their brands as franchise networks, and their corporate sites set out franchise terms, country lists and brand line-ups beside the menus.

Ownership is often grouped. English Wikipedia describes Famous Brands, formerly the Steers Group, as a South African company founded in 1960, based in Midrand and listed in Johannesburg, which runs its restaurant brands on a franchise model. Spur Corporation traces its start to the Golden Spur, opened in Newlands, Cape Town, in 1967, and its chains include Spur Steak Ranches and RocoMamas, according to the same encyclopaedia.

Further north the pattern repeats. Simbisa Brands says it opened its first Chicken Inn in 1987 and now trades in nine African countries, running its own brands such as Chicken Inn and Pizza Inn beside franchised names. English Wikipedia describes Chicken Republic, founded in 2004, as the flagship of the Lagos-based Food Concepts, with restaurants in Nigeria and Ghana. In Kenya, café chains such as Java House and Artcaffé have passed through private equity owners, each change reported in the business press.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: when and where it began, who has owned it, how many outlets a dated source counts, and how its menus, shopfronts and own websites describe it. Counts and ownership are given with their dates, and anything that rests only on a company’s own word is marked as such.

Art on the cup.

The name is more than a pun. In June 2023 Business Daily Africa reported on Artcaffé’s “Art in the City” campaign, launched on 8 March, International Women’s Day, and later renamed Herstory, which asked artists to submit works about women they admired. The competition ran online, through a portal on the Artcaffé website and on Instagram, and the entries were later shown in an online gallery on the same site. More than 270 works were sent in and 157 artists were considered, the paper said. On awards night the three winning works were printed on a giant billboard coffee cup, and the previous year’s winning artwork had already appeared on the chain’s takeaway cups.

The menu changes with the seasons. In July 2026 The Star reported a winter Mediterranean menu with dishes such as Casablanca Chicken Tagine and Beef Kebab Tabbouleh, the launch of a loyalty programme called Moments, and the chain’s expansion beyond Nairobi to Kisumu and Voi. The same report said the company’s wine list is bottled and labelled for it in the south of France. On its website the company lists seasonal signatures such as Turkish eggs and Medina beef arayes, and promotes evening events such as dance nights at its Britam Tower café and live music at the Gastro Bar in Imaara Mall. The site now lists its Gastro Bar and Food market beside the restaurants, takes table bookings, and runs a blog on topics such as its coffee partnership with the Kenyan roaster Guka’s Coffee.

For a design guide, Artcaffé shows how a café brand can stretch across bakery, bar and grocery formats while keeping one name, and how printing local artwork on cups and billboards can carry the “art” in that name. Compare Java House, the Nairobi coffee chain that ECP owned before it bought Artcaffé, and Mugg & Bean, the South African coffee-shop chain. For this guide we use a deep olive and a crust-brown accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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