Bradley Stoke couple celebrate five years of working together

Local residents Gary and Rachel Wilson are this month celebrating five years working together in their van-based, coffee-making business, Cafe2U.

The couple, who have been married since 1999 and lived in Bradley Stoke for the last 15 years, serve high-quality, barista-style, espresso-based coffee, to office workers in ‘non-traditional work locations’ i.e. business and industrial parks, across the region including Aztec West Business Park, Woodlands Business Park, Parkway North, Hambrook and Patchway.

Cafe2U is the world’s largest mobile coffee franchise system. It currently has over 200 franchisees across the world including over 60 in the UK.

Before buying their Cafe2U business, Gary was made redundant from the printing industry and Rachel worked for the Royal National Institute for the Blind. The couple say they had never thought of working together or even of being self-employed until Rachel saw Cafe2U on television and identified an opportunity to regain some control in their lives and to reap the rewards of their own hard work, with a self-employed business.

The couple, who say that they really enjoy working together, are out on the van every day and put their success down to working well as a team, each able to fulfil all roles within the company, from making the coffee to paying the invoices and organising marketing and advertising campaigns.

They say it also helps that they passionately ‘love’ coffee themselves and know how important it is that each cup is the very best they can make.

Says Rachel, “Making the perfect cup of coffee is the most important thing to me and when I hand that cup over with a beautiful heart or leaf on the top, the customer knows I’ve really cared about making their drink and I’d like to think that makes a real difference.”

At weekends, many Cafe2U van owners are found maximising on sales by making and selling coffee at sporting events and festivals, however in an altruistic move, Gary and Rachel try mainly to use the van for events that will ‘benefit a charity or our local Bradley Stoke community’ at the weekends. In this vein they have attended the Bradley Stoke festival for the last five years and will be attending a number of Cancer Research Race For Life events, hoping to top last year’s donation to the charity of £712.

“Our local community is very important to us, after all we’re out and about in it every day; by doing local charitable events at the weekend we know we are putting a little bit back, which is really important to us both.”

Photo: Rachel and Gary Wilson, owners of Cafe2U Bristol North,

This article originally appeared in the November 2014 edition of the Bradley Stoke Journal news magazine, delivered FREE, EVERY MONTH, to 9,450 homes in Bradley Stoke, Little Stoke and Stoke Lodge. Phone 01454 300 400 to enquire about advertising or leaflet insertion.

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