All your base are belong to us. Anyone who spent the late-‘90s on the internet will recognize the proto-meme. It was a meme before we even had a word for it, existing somewhere on the timeline between The Dancing Baby and I Can Has Cheezburger. It is etched into the brain of any chronically online Millennial who spent their formative years in the unsupervised corridors of the pre-social media internet.
I forgot where I was going with all that so we’ll just get to the point. FairWave Specialty Coffee Collective just bought Joe Van Gogh.
Made public on Monday, February 2nd, the Kansas City venture capital-backed specialty coffee conglomerate announced the acquisition of Joe Van Gogh, the three-decade old North Carolina coffee company. It comes exactly one month after the news of FairWave’s purchase of Milwaukee’s Fiddlehead’s Coffee Roasters, making Joe Van Gogh the second North Carolina-based roaster acquired by the conglomerate, after last year’s buy-out of Black & White Coffee Roasters.
Longtime Sprudge readers may remember the name Joe Van Gogh from an incident at their Duke University cafe where the company was essentially forced to fire two baristas for the crime of playing rap music. (Two weeks after the incident, JVG cut ties with the university and reinstated the employees.)
Joe Van Gogh now operates six locations across Durham and Chapel Hill, including a UNC location. But after 31 years, founder Robbie Roberts has decided for a change. “the word ‘Collective’ drew me in,” Roberts states. “Joe Van Gogh has always been about collaboration and openness. We’re a team, and everyone here has an innate drive to keep growing, to keep getting better. The team at FairWave are the same way.”
Per the press release, Roberts will remain a part of Joe Van Gogh for the “foreseeable future.” They join a growing number of coffee brands around the midwest and mid-Atlantic region under the FairWave umbrella.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
