Bad Ass Coffee of Hawaii expands with flexible store formats in Southeast

Bad Ass Coffee of Hawaii is leaning hard into smaller footprints as it pushes deeper into Florida and the Southeast, with six non-traditional U.S. locations now in the mix alongside regular cafés. The brand’s growth playbook now includes trailers, food trucks, kiosks, carts, counters, drive-thru-only units and captive-audience shops in airports, arenas, grocery stores and malls, a sign that the chain is trying to meet coffee drinkers where they already are instead of waiting for them to walk into a full café.

The company pointed to its 19,000-square-foot travel plaza off I-94 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as a proof point for the model. On June 3, it said the flexible format is helping franchisees deploy capital more efficiently inside a territory and capture traffic patterns a standalone shop can miss. That matters in coffee because the customer journey is often decided in seconds: a drive-thru lane, a terminal concourse or a grocery entrance can do more volume than a polished café that depends on people settling in.

The Southeast push is coming alongside traditional development in Florida and on the East Coast. Bad Ass Coffee said it had seven Florida locations and that AWA Investments had committed to a 10-unit agreement spanning the Gulf Coast of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. The first visible piece of that deal is a Gulf Shores, Alabama café at 520 West Beach Blvd, which the company lists as opening in summer 2026. Overall, the chain said it expects 25 to 30 new store openings this year, with growth driven by multi-unit partners and non-traditional sites.

That pace extends a quick run-up in system size. In July 2025, the company said it had 36 U.S. franchise locations and 63 more shops in development, after opening eight stores that year and targeting 15 additional openings by year-end. By early 2026, company materials described the brand as operating more than 30 locations across 14 states, while the latest announcement puts it at 45-plus U.S. franchise locations. The message is clear: Bad Ass Coffee is scaling faster by mixing smaller formats with standard cafés.

The brand’s origins still run back to the Big Island of Hawaii in 1989, with franchising starting in 1995. Royal Aloha Coffee, LLC bought the rights in 2019 and relaunched the brand in 2020 with updated logo, packaging, store design and products. Tom Wylie became chief operating officer of Royal Aloha Coffee Company in January 2026, with oversight of real estate, site selection analysis and construction, a move that fits a system built around territory fill-in and format flexibility. For a coffee chain trying to stretch across the Southeast, the next wave looks less like one big café opening at a time and more like a steady grid of smaller stops stitched into daily life.