A California idea brought home to Nebraska.

Scooter’s Coffee was started in 1998 by Don and Linda Eckles. Before coffee, according to a two-part interview published by Nebraska Rural Radio’s Building Nebraska series in June 2026, the couple’s working lives took in radio broadcasting, restaurant ownership, direct sales and a series of ventures that, the series said, often produced more lessons than profits. “We didn’t know anything about cost of goods sold. We didn’t know anything about labor. We didn’t know anything about marketing,” he said. “We just didn’t know what we were doing. But we just kept doing it.”

The idea came from the West Coast. The same series reported that while the family was living in California in the early 1990s, Don Eckles noticed a small drive-thru coffee stand drawing a steady line of customers, a format the article described as largely unfamiliar in Nebraska at the time. The Eckleses moved back to Omaha to build a drive-thru coffee business of their own, and the series said finding a location was difficult because many property owners were sceptical of the idea, while limited financing left the couple relying on their own savings and their own labour.

Accounts of the first site name different places. The Greater Omaha Chamber’s 2022 Business Hall of Fame profile says the couple had been in the coffee business since 1991 and in 1998 introduced quick-service drive-thru coffee to the city of Bellevue, Nebraska, and the company’s own history post of June 2021 also places its first drive-thru coffeehouse in Bellevue. Nebraska Rural Radio wrote on 15 June 2026 that the first Scooter’s Coffee location opened in Omaha in 1998, and its earlier article placed that first store near 24th Street and Cornhusker Road. In the interview Linda Eckles remembered the opening: “It was scary. It was exciting. And we knew we had to do it.”

The chamber profile adds a little background on the founders. Don Eckles grew up in Omaha and studied broadcasting at the Brown Institute in Minneapolis, and Linda Eckles grew up in Culbertson, Nebraska.

A name, a roaster and a franchise.

The name came early and has a plain explanation. The company’s history post of 13 June 2021 says the very first location was known as Scooter’s Java Express, and that Don and Linda Eckles named it “Scooter’s” after reviewing a list of options that included “Scooter.” The company says the name fitted its aim of helping customers “scoot in and scoot out” quickly — the drive-thru speed the brand was built around. The same post shows an early store in Omaha’s Westroads Mall and a photograph of the original menu.

The founders also built their own supply business. The Greater Omaha Chamber’s 2022 profile says that in 2000 the Eckleses started Harvest Roasting, which roasts the coffee and makes the baked goods sold in Scooter’s Coffee stores, and it lists Don Eckles as co-founder and chairman and Linda Eckles as co-founder of both businesses. English Wikipedia also says the chain’s coffee is produced by Harvest Roasting, founded alongside Scooter’s Coffee.

Growth came through franchising. The company’s franchising site says Don and Linda Eckles began franchising Scooter’s Coffee in 2001, and Wikipedia describes a franchise model in which some locations are drive-through only, without sit-in dining areas, in standardised buildings. In the June 2026 Building Nebraska interview, Don Eckles said the early years were difficult: “It’s a loyalty business. People were buying coffee from somebody the day before you opened, and you’ve got to win that business over a long period of time.” He told the series that the couple later brought in people who knew more about various parts of the business than they did.

The company has stayed in Nebraska. Wikipedia says Scooter’s Coffee is headquartered in Omaha, and records that Joe Thornton was named chief executive in November 2023 and that John Owen, a former McDonald’s and Subway executive, was named chief operating officer in January 2024. In 2022 the Greater Omaha Chamber inducted Don and Linda Eckles into the Omaha Business Hall of Fame, whose honourees are featured in a permanent exhibit at The Durham Museum.

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.

A sticker, a promise and a window.

One personal element of the Scooter’s identity is a smiley-face sticker. The company’s 2021 history post says that in 1998 Linda Eckles bought happy-face stickers and placed one on every drink she sold, as a way of saying “Have an amazing day!”, and that the stickers are still on its drinks. The Greater Omaha Chamber’s 2022 profile says the stickers have been on every cup passed from barista to customer since 1998, and quotes Linda Eckles: “It’s just a way of making our customers happy and reminding them that if they were having a bad day at work, they could look down at their lid and see somebody else cared about them.” Nebraska Rural Radio’s 2026 interview also said she became known for the stickers in the early days.

The second element is a line of copy. The chamber profile records the company’s brand promise as “Amazing People, Amazing Drinks… Amazingly Fast!”, and says the early business model was to find a great location and stay committed to quality drinks, speed of service and a big smile. The name itself, in the company’s account, describes the same speed: customers who scoot in and scoot out.

The third element is the format. Wikipedia describes Scooter’s locations as standardised buildings, some of them drive-through only, and the founders told Building Nebraska in 2026 that focusing on the drive-thru experience was one of their earliest decisions.

For a design guide, Scooter’s Coffee shows how a small personal gesture — a sticker placed on a lid by one of the founders — can become a lasting brand signature alongside a name that describes the service. Compare it with Dutch Bros, the Oregon drive-thru coffee company that began with a pushcart in 1992, and Biggby Coffee, the Michigan chain founded in 1995. For this guide we use roast red, smiley yellow and cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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