Kookaburra Coffee to open in former Verita Coffee space

Kookaburra Coffee may not have gotten to open in the Mead’s Corner space as owners Rebecca McNelly and Edward Fox had planned, but now they have plans to open in another former coffee shop.

They’re taking the former Verita Coffee space in the Westlink shopping center on West Central between Tyler and Maize Road.

It’s a big change from what they planned downtown, but McNelly says that’s because customers requested a drive-through space on the west side.

“We got a lot of feedback from our customers,” she says.

At around the same time, the Verita space became available.

“We just decided, well, that’s an opportunity.”

The drive-through will open sometime in the first week of October. There will be $1.99 lattes for the first six weeks.

Then the inside coffee shop will open in January with about 30 seats along with some new lounge furniture “to make it a little bit more comfy,” McNelly says.

She and Fox also are creating a meeting room out of former storage space.

Eventually, they plan to serve some light food, but it won’t be a full cafe.

A year ago, McNelly and Fox opened a mobile Kookaburra Coffee truck and named it for a bird in Fox’s native Australia.

The two also own Heartland Tech, a company they started in 2014 to sell and service coffee equipment.

McNelly is a former Mead’s Corner barista and had looked forward to carrying on some of the Mead’s tradition, but right after she and Fox signed a lease, the building sold.

She says the new owners “were really good to us in the transition, and we felt like everything was fair.”

However, she says, “We were pretty disheartened about losing the Mead’s space.”

Now, though, she says, “We’re excited about the west-side opportunity.”

And there will be more Kookaburras to come.

“We also want to let our customers tell us where they want us to be,” McNelly says. “We’re kind of leaving it up to them.”

As the brand becomes more recognizable, she says, “We’ll have a better idea of where we should go.”

This story was originally published September 19, 2018 at 5:47 PM.