New coffee startup creates competition for Starbucks and Dunkin’

By: Nicolas V.

Watch out Starbucks and Dunkin’ — there’s a new startup in town that’s vowing to sell New Yorkers a cup-of-joe cheaper and faster than the competition.

Bandit, founded by one of Uber’s earliest employees, is based on a pop-up coffee shop concept that’s exploding in China because it eschews the traditional brick-and-mortar model.

Bandit cafes look more like mall kiosks than coffee shops because they center around prefab, coffee-making equipment built at a factory in Michigan. The modules come fully equipped and can be easily moved, allowing Bandit to set up shop anywhere with a power outlet, including a warehouse, office building or hotel lobby, says founder Max Crowley.

Plus, they’re cheap to make. Whereas a Starbucks can cost upward of a half-a-million dollars to build, a Bandit cafe costs around $60,000, says Crowley, who helped launch Uber in Chicago as its 25th employee.

As a result, Bandit’s drink prices are roughly 25 percent less than its rivals in the New York City area, Crowley says. Bandit, which is opening its first store in Midtown Manhattan Wednesday, sells one-size hot coffee for $2 a pop, with options like mocha and matcha not topping $4.50.

All orders are done through its app, which is supposed to reduce wait times. In beta tests, orders are completing in 40 seconds.

“In a lot of ways, this is a plug-and-play cafe,” Crowley says. “You take what is now a nine- to 12-month process to launch a coffee shop — we can do that in a few hours.”

Bandit is modeled after Chinese juggernaut Luckin Coffee, which is poised to surpass Starbucks’ 4,000 Chinese locations by year’s end. Luckin has grown so fast since its 2017 launch, it listed on the Nasdaq in May. Luckin shares closed at $27.26 Tuesday, giving it a market value of $1.14 billion.

Crowley plans to see his no-frills-coffee concept add a handful of other locations in the next few months. But Wedbush analyst Nick Setyan said he thinks the no-frills, speed-ordering concept has “limited appeal,” attracting people in dense metropolitan areas who need to grab a cup-of-joe ASAP while on their way to work.