Second Cup Brand Guidelines: A 1975 Toronto Coffee Kiosk, Aegis Brands and Foodtastic

Two partners and a counter of coffee beans.

Second Cup began in Toronto in 1975; its head office is now in Mississauga, Ontario, English Wikipedia says. English Wikipedia names its founders as Tom Culligan and Frank O’Dea, and the company’s own website says it started in a kiosk in a shopping centre that sold only coffee beans. The trade magazine Daily Coffee News, writing in February 2021, also dates the business to 1975.

The early chain grew under Culligan. English Wikipedia says he later bought out O’Dea’s shares and expanded the business to 150 stores before selling it in 1988 to Michael Bregman, the founder of the mmmuffins chain. The company went public in 1993, and between 1993 and 2002 it passed through several American coffee businesses, among them Coffee People and Caribou Coffee, according to the same source.

In 2002 the Canadian restaurant group Cara Operations bought Second Cup, and in November 2006 Cara sold it to Dinecorp Hospitality. From that period on, English Wikipedia says, the trademark rights were split between a Canadian company, the Second Cup Ltd., and an international one, the Second Cup Coffee Company Inc.

Cafés, beans and a long run of owners.

Second Cup’s cafés sell hot and cold drinks, pastries, sandwiches, snacks and drinkware such as mugs and tumblers, English Wikipedia says, and the company also sells packaged coffee. In September 2012 it launched coffee pods for the Tassimo home brewing system, and in April 2015 it added a rewards programme run through a mobile app. In March 2012 the chain appeared in an episode of the television series Undercover Boss, shown on the W Network.

The identity most Canadians now recognise dates from a 2014 overhaul. On 4 December 2014 the trade magazine Marketing reported that Second Cup had unveiled a new logo, by the design firm Jackknife, set in black and white, and that “Coffee Co.” would be added to the name and logo. A redesigned Toronto café, which the company called its “Café of the Future,” served as a test store; the magazine said its interior was designed by 2×4 and was much lighter than the cream and earth tones of the existing cafés, washed in white with small touches of bright yellow. The same store had artist-designed cups, a mural by a local artist and a slow pour bar for hand-made coffee, and the chain then counted about 350 cafés, Marketing reported.

The Canadian company spent the late 2010s looking beyond coffee. In April 2018 it announced an agreement with National Access Cannabis to convert some western Canadian locations into licensed cannabis stores, with no cannabis products sold in its cafés, English Wikipedia says. In November 2019 the listed parent announced it would change its name to Aegis Brands, and in December 2019 it bought the Ottawa coffee chain Bridgehead.

The coffee business itself then changed hands again. On 8 February 2021, Daily Coffee News reported that Aegis was selling Second Cup to Foodtastic, a Quebec restaurant franchisor based in Pierrefonds, outside Montreal. The magazine cited Aegis’s latest quarterly report for a count of about 231 Second Cup locations in Canada at the time, roughly 200 franchised and 31 run by the company. It also noted that Foodtastic then had some 130 franchised restaurants across at least ten brands, including Au Coq, La Belle et La Boeuf and Monza, and said Second Cup would be by far the biggest business in Foodtastic’s portfolio by number of locations.

After the sale, Aegis said it would concentrate on Bridgehead and its cannabis business, Daily Coffee News reported. Second Cup’s Canadian website now carries a Foodtastic copyright line, and its French-language pages trace the company from that 1975 kiosk to a national network of cafés.

Design and documentation.

Coffee-shop chains are brands people meet at the counter. The cup handed over, the sleeve around it, the menu board behind the barista and the sign over the door all carry the name, and the companies show them in their own photographs and on their own websites. A chain that buys another often keeps the second name on the shop front, so one owner can run several looks on the same high street.

Naming is usually plain and close to the product. Chains name house blends, seasonal drinks and loyalty schemes in their own voice, borrow words from Italian or from their home language, and describe store formats by where they sit: high streets, railway and underground stations, airports, shopping centres and, more recently, drive-throughs. Some keep a single format; others add kiosks and cafés inside other retailers.

Ownership is where the stories diverge. Many chains began with one café and a founder, then passed through private equity firms, family investment companies or stock-market listings, and some have gone private again. Corporate pages tell the founding story, while independent trade press and national newspapers record the deals, the restructurings, the court rulings and the openings abroad, with dates.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each chain: who founded it and where, who owns it now, how it grew and what it says about its coffee and baking. Where a fact rests only on the company’s own word, it is given as the company’s claim. The palette and typeface shown are our own unofficial interpretation, not the brand’s.

One name, two companies.

The name now belongs to two separate businesses, and the news coverage of 2025 shows why the difference matters. On 22 May 2025 the international franchisor, the Second Cup Coffee Company Inc., obtained protection under Canada’s Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, according to The Deep Dive, which reported the filing on 10 June 2025 from documents filed with the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy. That company controls the global rights to the “Second Cup Café” name and, the report said, ran about 170 cafés in some 20 countries, including Pakistan, Egypt, Azerbaijan and Cyprus, but none in Canada.

The same insolvency filings state that the international company is not affiliated with, and is independent from, Second Cup Coffee Co., the Canadian chain. The Deep Dive reported that the Canadian business, owned by Foodtastic since its 2021 purchase, ran 178 stores across the country and was marking its 50th anniversary in 2025. The court process concerned only the international franchisor. The Act, the report explained, lets a financially distressed corporation restructure its affairs under court supervision instead of entering bankruptcy.

The Canadian chain has had a long line of parents: Culligan’s own company, Bregman, a public listing, American coffee owners, Cara, Dinecorp, the Second Cup Ltd. and Aegis Brands, and since 2021 Foodtastic. Each change kept the Second Cup name on the cafés.

For a design guide, Second Cup shows how a coffee name can survive repeated changes of owner and a split of its trademark rights. Compare Tim Hortons, another Canadian coffee chain, and Starbucks. For this guide we use roast brown, cranberry red and a milky cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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