5 former Dairy Barns will open as Ready Coffee shops by end of summer

Ready Coffee was bustling with upbeat pop music as employees in the small Baldwin shop served drive-thru customers on a recent chilly morning. 

Formerly a Dairy Barn drive-thru convenience store with the iconic red barn look and silo storefront, the renovated building opened as a coffee shop in December. But it retained the two drive-thru lanes, each on opposite sides of the building. Like most Ready Coffee shops, there is no indoor seating, a growing trend in the coffee industry, experts said. 

Troy Wiener, 22, was among the customers waiting for coffee in their cars who remarked on their nostalgia for Dairy Barn, which got its start on Long Island in the 1960s.

“I used to come to the Dairy Barn all the time. And then it was empty for a while," Wiener said. "And then they opened this and now I come here pretty much all the time. … I like it a lot,” said the Baldwin resident, who ordered three shots of espresso over ice.

The Baldwin shop, located at 870 Atlantic Ave., is the fifth Ready Coffee location in the chain but the first on Long Island, after the Hudson Valley-based coffee business purchased 10 former Dairy Barn stores from Long Island City-based Simi Enterprises LLC in 2023 and 2024 for about $9 million.

A location in Glen Cove opened Friday.

Ready Coffee has announced openings for five more stores: Lynbrook and North Baldwin shops will open in March, a Freeport location in the spring, and Hewlett and East Northport shops in the summer.

Ready Coffee owns three other former Dairy Barns — in East Meadow, Franklin Square and Oceanside — but the company declined to say when those will open as coffee shops.

The company, which roasts its coffee beans at a facility in Wappingers Falls, employs about 130 people.

The chain, which sells coffee, tea, energy drinks, fruit smoothies and shakes, opened its first four shops in the Hudson Valley, starting with a shop in Wappingers Falls in 2019.

Dairy Barn stores sold milk, ice cream, eggs, meat cold cuts, bread, candy, beer and other items.

The coffee chain saw its purchase of the former Dairy Barn sites as an opportunity to breathe new life into something with a strong history, said Jed Bonnem, a former hedge fund investment manager who co-founded the coffee chain.

“We thought that what we did had enough similarities to the way Dairy Barn interacted with, had a relationship with and served their communities," he said, adding the properties were a "suitable" fit with Ready Coffee's model. 

None of the Ready Coffee shops have speaker systems outside for drive-thru ordering. 

Almost all the Long Island shops will retain the double drive-thru setup from Dairy Barn, with employees serving motorists at a window in one lane or stepping outside through a door on the opposite side of the building to serve customers in their cars in the other lane, Bonnem said.

Because Ready Coffee focuses on serving the on-the-go market, the chain has only one shop with indoor seating for customers — in LaGrange in Dutchess County, he said.

“Our customers tend to be those with busy lives who want their daily coffee to speed them up, not slow them down,” he said. 

Franky Benedetto, 35, frequents the Baldwin shop on her way to her human resources job in Bethpage, she said Tuesday morning while at the drive-thru window.

“They’re really fast. They’re really friendly ... and efficient, and I love it,” the Oceanside resident said.

Coffee chains that focus on drive-thrus are among the restaurant industry’s fastest-growing categories, achieving double-digit location growth in 2024, said Kevin Schimpf, director of industry research at Technomic, a Chicago-based restaurant and retail industry research firm. 

“Consumers love the convenience of drive-thru units and they’re also cheaper/faster for operators to build out, which is another reason they’ve proliferated so quickly,” he said in an email.

Dutch Bros Coffee, Scooter’s Coffee, Biggby Coffee and 7 Brew Coffee are among the big players that have seen substantial growth in recent years, he said.

The world’s largest coffee chain, Starbucks, has numerous drive-thru-only stores.

But in Holbrook on Feb. 8, Starbucks opened its first standard double-sided drive-thru that has one lane specifically designed for mobile order pick-ups, while the other lane is dedicated to traditional drive-thru ordering, the Seattle-based chain said.

Leaving a mark

The first Dairy Barn was opened in 1961 by Dieter Cosman. He had previously worked primarily in the wholesale dairy business, with his Oak Tree Dairy in East Northport supplying several food chains on Long Island.

By the late 1950s, when customers were no longer interested in having milk delivered to their homes, Cosman decided to enter the retail business with a convenience store with two canopied drive-thrus — what would become Dairy Barn.

The store numbers grew, with Dairy Barns becoming popular places to quickly pick up household staples.

By August 1972, there were 54 Dairy Barns, which were expected to generate $20 million that year, according to Newsday archives.

There were about 45 Dairy Barns left in 2008, when the Cosman family sold about 40 to Simi Enterprises, a family-owned company that changed the stores’ name to The Barn, Aegina Angeliades, a principal in Simi, told Newsday in an interview Wednesday.

Simi retained the iconic look of Dairy Barns, but made inventory changes such as adding organic milk and eggs and upgrading the quality of the coffee, she said.

“Those were big changes because they were not known for their coffee. And we ... upped the coffee game a lot, like freshly ground, freshly brewed coffee. And we became well-known for coffee at a time when drive-thru coffee was really starting to take off,” she said.

In 2012, the Cosman family announced that it planned to close Oak Tree Dairy and sell the 36.87-acre parcel to BK Elwood LLC, a subsidiary of The Engel Burman Group. BK Elwood bought the property a few years later and built a condominium community for people 55 years and older.

After closing a few Barns, Simi had 35 left by 2020, when it decided to close the majority of the stores after seeing revenue decline due to increasing grocery competition, including from drugstores and grocery delivery services, Angeliades said. 

In its heyday, Dairy Barn "was an excellent concept at the time because … it was [a choice between] the supermarket or Dairy Barn," she said. 

In 2020, the family decided to lease 28 Dairy Barn stores to GFG, which stands for Greek from Greece, she said. GFG had planned to run the shops as convenience stores and add Greek brands of packaged foods, but after the company ran into problems opening the stores, Simi took over the properties again, Angeliades said.

In 2023, Simi hired Sovereign Realty Group LLC in Syosset to market 17 of the properties, 10 of which Ready Coffee bought.

There was a lot of interest in the properties from potential buyers because of the public’s nostalgia for Dairy Barn, said Clem Coté III, managing principal at Sovereign.

“Everyone I talk to remembers what Dairy Barn they went to, what their mother drove as a car, what they used to buy there,” he said, adding he was glad that Ready Coffee was able to repurpose the stores.

The former Dairy Barn buildings that Ready Coffee is taking over were in need of a refresh and redirection, and the coffee company is positioned to succeed, Angeliades said.

“They knew the space. They knew their concept ... and they just needed the locations. So, we were happy to pass the torch,” she said.

Simi still owns five properties that were originally Dairy Barns that it leases to operators, said Angeliades’ sister Irena Angeliades.

Four of them, operating as The Barn, are in East Rockaway, Lindenhurst, Seaford and West Babylon and have the original 1960s look of Dairy Barn, Irena Angeliades said. A Bellmore store operates as Buzz’d Express Coffee and is sporting a different look, she said.

Irena Angeliades also operates The Barn in Huntington in a leased space.

In 2024, Simi sold a Merrick store and the rights to use The Barn name to an operator, she said.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.