Hello all, welcome back to Inc.’s 1 Smart Business Story! Starbucks built a coffee empire. Today we’re looking at how its fastest-growing rivals are looking to topple it.

But Brands like 7 Brew, Scooter's Coffee, Dutch Bros, and Blank Street aren't trying to out-Starbucks Starbucks. They're betting customers increasingly care about convenience, personalization, and social media appeal more than finding a cozy "third place" to sip a latte.

7 Brew started with a single Arkansas stand in 2017 to more than 800 locations across 38 states. Dutch Bros has surpassed 1,200 locations, and Scooter's operates more than 900 stores. Many of these locations are tiny, drive-thru-focused kiosks designed to get customers in and out in minutes.

Speed alone isn't the differentiator, Inc. contributor Lillian Stone reported, with the real growth engine being customization. While Starbucks has moved to put limits on increasingly complex drink orders, challengers are embracing them. 7 Brew says customers can create tens of thousands of flavor combinations across coffee, teas, lemonades, energy drinks, sodas, smoothies, and milkshakes.

TikTok's "DrinkTok," consumers share hyper-specific concoctions and limited-edition drinks. Some chains even source new menu items directly from customer-created recipes like 7 Brew's recent nationwide rollout of Cotton Candy Cream Lemonade, which originated on Reddit.

In this story you’ll discover:

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Starbucks competitors like 7 Brew are booming—even as some coffee customers are ditching java for other specialty drinks.

BY LILLIAN STONE

You can’t order a drip coffee at 7 Brew. You can order three shots of espresso over ice, blended with funnel cake syrup and white chocolate. At some locations, you can even throw in a liquid collagen protein boost for an extra $2. And you can adorn the whole thing with a generous dollop of sweet cream cold foam—plus a chocolate-caramel drizzle, if you want to get really wild.

Founded in 2017 as a single drive-thru coffee stand in Rogers, Arkansas, 7 Brew now oversees more than 800 franchised and corporate-owned locations in 38 states. In June, the company topped Yelp’s list of the fastest-growing brands of 2026, which cited “244 percent growth in consumer interest” in 7 Brew on the Yelp platform. Other coffee companies that made the list include Black Rock Coffee Bar, Dutch Bros, and Scooter’s Coffee.

Starbucks still dominates the coffee shop market share with nearly 17,000 U.S. locations and $37.2 billion in annual revenue, followed by Dunkin’, which recently filed to go public for the third time, with just over 10,000 U.S. locations. But a stacked slate of public and private challengers is beating down the door of the $58.5 billion U.S. branded coffee shop market. Publicly-traded Dutch Bros, the third-largest coffee chain in the U.S. by sales and locations, now has more than 1,200 locations across 25 states. Scooter’s Coffee trails at 923 stores across 32 states, and 7 Brew isn’t far behind. Meanwhile, quick-scaling, VC-backed chains like Blank Street, Bluestone Lane, and La La Land are also gobbling up real estate, and long-standing players like Better Buzz and Biggby Coffee are targeting aggressive expansion.

As Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol works to re-establish the company’s role as a “third place,” these fast-growing coffee chains are prioritizing convenience and personalization, promising to deliver exactly what the customer wants—even if the customer doesn’t want coffee at all.

In the so-called “limited service restaurant” coffee space, speed is everything. The segment, which encompasses drive-thru operations like 7 Brew, Dutch Bros, and Scooter’s, is “one of the most lucrative and active segments in the overall chain restaurant landscape,” says Huy Do, a research and insights manager at food and beverage intelligence platform Datassential. Do adds that those with drive-thru offerings are “biggest standout winners in the coffee space.” 

Drive-thru operations exploded during the pandemic as consumer habits shifted toward speed and low-contact interactions. “Scooter’s Coffee was one of the first drive-thru only coffee concepts to hit the Midwest at scale and had already begun its rapid expansion in 2019,” Scooter’s Coffee CEO Joe Thornton tells Inc. The peak pandemic years “accelerated” that growth, he says. (In 2025, the company hit $859 million in systemwide sales.) “Drive-thru concepts played an important role in consumers’ lives [at that time], and we were proud to play a part in that,” Thornton adds. 

The shift may be permanent. Since the start of the pandemic, 7 Brew, Dutch Bros, and Scooter’s have each built hundreds of new retail spaces. 7 Brew alone has added 780 locations since the beginning of 2023. (7 Brew was acquired in January 2020 by an investor group operating as Brew Culture, with additional investments include a majority investment from Drink House Holdings in 2021 and Blackstone backing in 2024.)

Many of these are very small spaces—modular stores with no lobbies, tables, or customer restrooms. The tiny store footprint is a plus if you want to serve millions, fast; customers pull up, order, and drive away caffeinated in minutes. The modular kiosk model also allows companies to pursue explosive growth with relatively low overhead. 7 Brew, which generated approximately $1.2 billion in systemwide sales in 2025 according to its franchise disclosure documents, recently beat out Dutch Bros, which reported $1.6 billion in fiscal 2025, to claim defunct Salad and Go locations. The salad chain permanently shut down all locations in August 2026 following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, leaving the compact buildings—designed specifically for drive-thru use—up for grabs in markets already enthusiastic about the drive-thru kiosk concept.

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