Your entire database belongs to us. Anyone who spent the slow 1990s on the Internet will recognize this protomeme. It was a meme before we even had a word for it, existing somewhere in the timeline between “The Dancing Baby” and “I Can Has Cheezburger.” This is etched in the brain of every chronic Internet user who spent their formative years in the unsupervised corridors of the Internet of social media.
I forgot where I was going with all this, so let’s get to the point. FairWave specialty coffee collective I just bought it Joe Van Gogh.
The publication was released on Monday, February 2IIA Kansas City-based venture capital-backed specialty coffee conglomerate has announced the acquisition of Joe Van Gogh, a three-decade-old North Carolina coffee company. It comes exactly one month after news of FairWave’s purchase of Milwaukee’s Fiddlehead’s coffee roaster, making Joe Van Gogh the second North Carolina-based coffee roaster acquired by the conglomerate, following last year’s buyout of Black & White Coffee Roasters.
Longtime Sprudge readers may remember the name Joe Van Gogh from an incident that took place at a Duke University coffee shop where the company was forced to fire two baristas for the crime of playing rap music. (Two weeks after the incident, JVG severed ties with the university and reinstated the employees.)
Joe Van Gogh currently operates six locations in Durham and Chapel Hill, including the UNC location. But after 31 years, founder Robbie Roberts decided to make a change. “I was drawn to the word ‘Collection,’” Roberts says. “Joe Van Gogh has always been about cooperation and openness. We are a team and everyone here has an innate drive to constantly develop and be better. The FairWave team is the same.”
Roberts will remain a part of Joe Van Gogh “for the foreseeable future,” according to the press release. They join a growing number of coffee brands in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions under the FairWave umbrella.
