An office coffee service, a honeymoon and a store on the Westside.

The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf grew out of a Los Angeles office coffee business. In an obituary published on 3 May 2014, the Los Angeles Times said that Herbert Hyman, a Los Angeles native who had run a vending business while a student at UCLA, sold that business in 1963 and started an office coffee service. English Wikipedia dates the company’s founding to September 1963 and describes it in the same way, as a coffee service for offices.

The paper said Hyman met Mona, an accountant, on one of his jobs, and that they married in 1966. Their honeymoon in her native Sweden changed his idea of what coffee could be, and he decided to import, roast and sell gourmet coffee back in Los Angeles. In 1968, the Times wrote, Herbert and Mona Hyman opened a small store in Brentwood, on the city’s Westside, selling whole beans in one-pound bags from places such as Costa Rica, Colombia and Kenya. Hyman called the store Coffee Bean. Customers could smell the beans in a roaster, watch how the coffee was brewed and sample different varieties before choosing one.

The store itself carried Hyman’s own work. According to the Times, the original Coffee Bean had oak counters he built himself, with room for a few stools. The paper said that by the 1970s he had expanded to about ten stores in Southern California and had added teas to the menu.

The Times also recorded the origin of the company’s signature drink. In the late 1980s an employee brought a blender to the Westwood store on a hot summer day and mixed ice, coffee extract and chocolate powder; the result became the company’s signature Ice Blended drink. Wikipedia dates that episode to the summer of 1987. The same obituary said Starbucks approached the Hymans in 1991 about buying the business, and that Hyman turned the offer down.

The Sassoons, private equity and Jollibee.

Ownership left the founding family in the late 1990s. The Los Angeles Times reported that in 1996 the Hymans sold the Asian franchise for the chain to Victor Sassoon, a Singaporean concert promoter and entrepreneur, and that he bought the company in 1998. English Wikipedia adds that Victor Sassoon and his brother Sunny Sassoon, together with Severin Wunderman, bought the parent company, International Coffee & Tea, LLC, from the Hymans that year, and that the holding company kept that name. Wikipedia says the chain opened in Singapore in 1996 and reached Malaysia the following year.

Wikipedia records that Sunny Sassoon served as president and chief executive from 1998 until 2009, when Mel Elias took over those roles, and that in September 2013 a significant equity position in the company was acquired by Advent International, in partnership with Mirae Asset Private Equity of South Korea and CDIB Capital of Taiwan. The Los Angeles Times reported Herbert Hyman’s death at his home in Camarillo in its obituary of 3 May 2014.

The present owner is Philippine. CNN Business reported on 24 July 2019 that Jollibee Foods Corporation planned to acquire the California-based chain and wanted to grow the brand in Asia. GMA News later reported that Jollibee completed the acquisition of the whole company on 24 September 2019, through Java Ventures LLC, a US company owned by Super Magnificent Coffee Company Pte. Ltd. of Singapore, itself a subsidiary of Jollibee Worldwide Pte Ltd. Jollibee Foods Corporation has owned The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf since 2019.

Wikipedia says the company’s coffees are roasted and its teas blended at its facility in Camarillo, California, and that in 2010 it launched CBTL, a single-serve brewing system for home use whose name is formed from the brand’s initials.

Design and documentation.

Coffee-house and deli chains carry their identity on many surfaces at once. A name and a mark sit on the street sign and the shopfront, then repeat on paper cups, sleeves, lids, carry-out bags, sandwich wraps and loyalty cards, and again on the menu board above the counter. Each of those surfaces is printed or built by different suppliers, often in different places, so a chain’s visual system has to survive changes of material, size and colour reproduction.

The menu board is where much of the design work shows. It has to hold a name, prices and category headings at reading distance, and over the past two decades many chains have moved from printed panels to screens, which changes how type, colour and photography are used. Interiors carry the identity too: counter fronts, seating, lighting, wall graphics and the colour of the walls themselves are part of how a chain presents its name.

Each guide below looks at who started the brand, who owns it now and how its name and mark appear, separating what independent dated sources record from what the company says about itself.

Oak woodwork, burgundy and tea crate panels.

The clearest public statement of what the brand treats as its own visual language came with a store redesign. QSR Magazine reported on 8 September 2010 that a new store in the Conejo Valley, California, had unveiled the opening example of four new store design concepts created by the architecture and design firm Gensler. The magazine said the company had defined three design elements as “sacred” to the brand: oak woodwork, the colour burgundy and its signature tea crate panels.

The same report described the Thousand Oaks store in detail: woodwork wrapping the bar and the ceiling planes, a stained concrete floor stamped with the company’s logo, a bar arranged for easier contact between staff and customers, a community message wall for patrons to fill, and an outdoor patio built around a fire pit. Gensler’s Guy Williams told the magazine that the design team sought to acknowledge the company’s Southern California roots.

A month later, on 8 October 2010, QSR Magazine named the four concepts — Original, Heritage, Tea Crate and Lounge — in an interview with Terry Mansky, the company’s chief administrative officer. Mansky said the Original model was intended mainly for suburban sites with patios, Heritage for dense urban spaces, Tea Crate for urban and college-campus locations, and Lounge, a larger format, for markets in Asia and the Middle East as well as airports and malls. All four, he said, would keep the oak, burgundy and tea crate elements, though the new designs were “not your grandparents’ Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.”

The Los Angeles Times obituary recalled that the original Brentwood store had oak counters Herbert Hyman built himself. The name has also been compressed over the years: Wikipedia notes that the chain is often called simply “Coffee Bean” or “The Coffee Bean,” and the home brewing system uses the initials CBTL.

For a design guide, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf shows how a chain can write down a short list of materials and colours — oak, burgundy, tea crates — and carry them through store formats built for suburbs, campuses and airports across several owners. Compare it with Peet’s Coffee, another coffee roaster that began in California in the 1960s, and Caribou Coffee. For this guide we use burgundy, oak and cup white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.