A growing chain of drive-thru coffee shops has submitted a final plan for its first location in the State College area.
College Township Planning Commission on March 4 reviewed the final land development plan for 7 Brew Coffee’s proposed shop at 1919 S. Atherton St. in the Hills Plaza. The 540-square-foot shop and 230-square-foot remote cooler will replace 48 existing parking spaces between Kish and First National banks in the parking area near Ollie’s Bargain Outlet.
Founded in Rogers, Arkansas, 7 Brew serves no food, only drinks including coffee, tea, hot chocolate, Italian sodas, smoothies, shakes and energy drinks. Travis Odom, a 7 Brew Pennsylvania franchise partner who presented the plan, said it also does not have indoor seating, though it does accept walk-up orders, mainly from first responders because their vehicles might not fit in the drive-thru. First responders receive a 50% discount on the orders.
The plan includes a dual lane drive-thru, but there is no speaker box for placing orders. Instead staff members come to customers with iPads to take their orders. Customers then pull forward and staff bring their drinks to them.
A canopy extends from the building to shield employees from the elements, and they are also provided heavy coats and rain gear depending on weather, as well as having outdoor heaters in the winter, and staff rotate on a regular basis.
The time from when an order is placed to delivery is about four minutes, Odom said during a preliminary sketch plan presentation last year.
The drive-thru can stack 15 cars, and Odom said that during peak hours 7 Brew averages 8-10 vehicles. He previously said that even at the busiest hours of 7 Brew’s busiest locations, the peak is 14 vehicles.
Expected operating hours are 5:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Peak hours are typically 7 to 9 a.m., and planning commission member Robert Hoffman noted that the two banks do not open until 9 a.m., nor does Ollie’s, meaning there is less likely to be conflicting traffic.
Responding to a concern about the ability for both lanes exiting the drive-thru to turn either left or right, Odom said orders are staggered so cars are almost never exiting at the same time.
“As drinks are being prepared…. 99.9% of the time neither are exiting at the same time because of how preparation goes and how orders are going into the system,” Odom said. “So typically you are going 1,2,1,2 or whichever way it goes. In all cases that we’ve ever seen from a traffic perspective, it’s usually five, six seconds in between the cars moving.”
Since presenting the sketch plan last year, rolled curbs were added to the final plan to delineate the drive-thru from the rest of the lot to avoid confusion.
“That’s a pretty active area and from what I’ve observed your curbing and delineation of islands will help really separate you in that … confusion as people drive through there,” Hoffman said.
As for the buildings, both the both the shop and the cooler will be pre-manufactured and trucked to the site, “which expedites our construction timeline,” 7 Brew wrote in a letter accompanying the land development plan.
While the planning commission recommended approval by College Township Council, it recommended that it deny 7 Brew’s request to pay a fee in lieu of constructing sidewalk along Branch Road.
Township ordinance would require the company to construct about 400 feet of sidewalk from where the walk currently ends on Branch Road to the northern side of entrance to Hills Plaza. The township can also grant a fee in lieu. Staff recommended accepting the fee in lieu, principal planner Lindsay Schoch said, because of the difficulty of constructing the sidewalk, which would require a retaining wall along the adjacent hill or curbs, gutters and stormwater facilities.
7 Brew offered to pay $22,983 as a fee in lieu of building the sidewalk, which has an estimated cost of about $61,000. Planning commission member Ed Darrah said that money could be used toward future construction if needed, and that as it currently stands it would be a “sidewalk to nowhere.”
But other commission members said the sidewalk isn’t impossible to construct and worried that if a future developer submitted a plan for a larger land development, it would refuse to construct the sidewalk or pay a fee larger than what 7 Brew did.
Odom said he was concerned about 7 Brew’s small development bearing “the burden of the whole sidewalk.” Planning commission member Ray Forziat suggested Odom could negotiate the cost with the Hills Plaza owner.
Planning commission ultimately recommended 5-0 that council approve the plan but deny the fee in lieu request. College Township Council has authority for final approval, and can decide to accept the fee in lieu.
7 Brew Coffee has over 300 locations in 31 states and is aiming for 1,000 by the end of 2025. In Pennsylvania, Odom’s group has opened locations in Red Lion and Sinking Spring and another is set to open soon in Mechanicsburg.
