Clove Café in Tasmania has passed through several hands since opening in 2014, with each owner adding something new to the café.
When mother and daughter Kylie Danielson and Alex McLean took over the café in 2018, they introduced a range of gifts, plants, and retail items to the local coffee shop.
“We’re right in the suburbs outside Launceston, with lovely homes and locals, a private school across the road, and nursing home around the corner, so there’s quite a variety of different customers,” Kylie says. “That means we can carry a nice range of gifts and items of a good quality.”
This includes candles and body lotion, baskets and deli items. Many products are sourced locally, and the same goes for the café’s food and desserts.
“We’re a bit restricted having a small kitchen, so we look at what we can offer and have gone down the road of quiches, salads, and fresh meals that people can take away,” Kylie says.
“We’re also a bit off the street, which gives us a great outdoor dining area. It’s a nice welcoming café, with a bright and airy feel.”
For its coffee, Kylie and Mal continued the previous owner’s relationship with Mocopan Coffee and Doppio Foods, but with their own past experience in hospitality, felt the roaster’s Pasquale blend was a better fit for the café’s demographic.
“It’s a nice, smooth blend. With an older generation of customers, we didn’t want a really strong coffee, just an all-rounder they were all quite happy with,” Kylie says.
“It’s a bit of an older area with younger people moving in and renovating the older homes. We get a lot of mature regular customers, who find it easy to come in, because they don’t have to go to Launceston and struggle with parking.”
Kylie adds that building relationships with their customers has been the best part of taking over Clove.
“The opportunity to buy the café arose after my daughter started working here. I’ve always worked in hospitality and we thought it would be a nice, quiet Monday to Friday business, but it’s actually quite busy now, which is really good,” Kylie says.
“We’ve been here for two years now and have ticked quite a few of the boxes we hoped to.”
Clove Café
1 Amy Road, Newstead, Tasmania, 7250
Open Monday to Friday 8am to 4pm
(03) 6343 4096