South African Luxury Brand Coco Safar Disrupts Bakery Market

The illustrious café bakery is heading to New York in 2023

Cape Town /PRNewswire/ - When South African luxury brand, Coco Safar staged a 3-day pop-up in Johannesburg, nothing could have prepared the café bakery for the mayhem that would ensue with locals queuing in droves to get a taste of their world-renowned croissants & coffee. While many successful bakeries would be ecstatic to move 1,000 croissants in a day, Coco Safar's pop-up sold over 8,500 croissants in less than 72 hours at premium prices twice as high as the local equivalent.

The pop-up was a preview for Coco Safar's upcoming global expansion. "We were blown away by the demand. It was a surprising success and clearly cements our position and authority in a constantly changing market" said Coco Safar's co-founder, Wilhelm Liebenberg.

With 4 locations in Africa, Coco Safar is an oddity in the luxury café, bakery and patisserie scene, which explains the explosive demand in Johannesburg. Coco Safar has been consistently racking up accolades, rated by Bloomberg as the world's best coffee, while Food & Wine USA ranked its croissants among the best in the world, on par with bakeries in Paris, Tokyo & Melbourne.

Croissants are notoriously difficult to execute. The challenge is compounded in SA, where a bakery doesn't have access to skilled viennoiserie-making or high-quality ingredients. Coco Safar compensated its lack of resources with obsession and boundless creativity, committed to engineer the perfect croissant and concoct never-before-attempted croissant flavor combinations.

While specialty coffee and croissants are popular categories on their own, and for many a daily ritual, Coco Safar's global accolades mark the first time a bakery has been recognized for serving best-in-class for both under the same roof. Combined with its refined hospitality & escapist design evocative of la Dolce Vita, Coco Safar is poised to generate some of the highest sales per sq meter in the world in its category.

Regarded by industry insiders as the "Hermes of coffee, bakery and café culture", Coco Safar will start its international expansion in 2023 with a flagship location on Union Square, near 5th Avenue, in New York. "We chose New York because we feel Coco Safar's devotion to authenticity and innovation will resonate with the pioneering spirit of the Big Apple," pointed Liebenberg. "The city is accessible, incredibly exciting and a showcase for the rest of the world."