Ready Coffee takes over Baldwin Dairy Barn

Jed Bonnem wants to change the coffee landscape on Long Island and, with the early December opening  of Ready Coffee in Baldwin, he’s on his way.

Since the former hedge fund manager founded the company in 2019, it’s opened four locations in the Hudson Valley, but now it is poised for more rapid growth: Ready Coffee owns 10 former Dairy Barn locations and Bonnem hopes to see them all operating by the end of 2025.

Dairy Barn, the local drive-through convenience-store chain that comprised, at its peak, about 70 locations, was "perfect" for Ready Coffee, Bonnem said, whereas the upstate stores had to be "purpose built" to achieve what each Dairy Barn already has: 500 feet of workspace flanked by two drive-up windows.

The Ready Coffee experience begins even before you pull up in front of that window: A worker with an iPad approaches your car and takes your order on a tablet. That order shows up on a screen inside the store and the team begins assembling your beverage from scratch, really from scratch: Beans, roasted upstate, are ground for each coffee order and the foundation of the drink, an espresso, is expertly pulled from a La Marzocco machine. Ready Coffee designs its workspace so that coffee, toppings, flavorings and nine types of milk are all within easy reach of the baristas so that your drink can, ideally, be made within 40 seconds. Bonnem says that the time it takes to deliver the order is "less than half the time of our competitors."

The menu lists six signature drinks such as Caramel Blondie (caramel and white chocolate latte) and Storm King (hazelnut mocha), which you can caffeinated or not, with the milk of your choice and anywhere from two shots ($4.50) to four ($6.50). The same drink, frozen, costs 50 cents more. There’s cold brew ($4 to $5.75), frozen coffee (like a milky granita, $4.75 to $7) as well as plain espresso, cappuccino, latte and a "Ready regular" ($3.25 to $4.25).

Not ready for coffee? There are iced and hot teas, shakes and smoothies, and the company’s own Ready Energy, a take on Red Bull. But if you don’t see anything on the menu that floats your boat, you can make up your own drink. According to Bonnem, "a customized drink is no harder for us to make than one on the menu."

A native of the Pacific Northwest, Bonnem "grew up with coffee in my blood, having that coffee house experience — the hanging out for hours, the vinyl records. Starbucks was based on that model and I love it."

But, he noted, "that model doesn’t fit into how a lot of people lead their lives now. I love solving interesting problems and the problem I wanted to solve with Ready Coffee was how can we bring that craft coffee experience to people on the go?"

Bonnem expects the next Ready Coffee locations, in Lynbrook and Glen Cove, to open within the next two months.

Ready Coffee, 870 Atlantic Ave., Baldwin, readycoffeeco.com. Open 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week.