Christian coffee shops are everywhere in Fresno and Clovis, but Kuppa Joy stands out as one of the oldest, and probably the most faith-forward. Founded 14 years ago and currently boasting eight coffeehouses and dozens of employees, Kuppa Joy not only predates most of its church-coffee competitors, it also dwarfs them in both size and locations.
It’s also the only one that has a throne.
The throne is impossible to miss at Kuppa Joy’s original, Old Town Clovis location, where it’s attached to the wall opposite the cash register, jutting into the empty space. The big empty chair is less conspicuous at the Cedar and Shepherd location (opened in 2019), provided you forget to look up, where it dangles from the high ceiling like a mobile in a baby’s crib.
Kuppa Joy has thrones at all of their full-sized cafes, in contrast to the “Joy-Thru” car kiosks, which have neither full-sized thrones nor indoor seating. Yet all of them offer Kuppa Joy’s unique blend of genuinely high-end coffee and unabashedly religious iconography – from the Biblical word art to the names of the special drinks to the graphic designs on the cups. Like the one depicting an image of Jesus hanging from the cross, menaced by a Roman soldier and a hissing dragon.
In light of the rest of Kuppa Joy’s branding, throughout my time in Fresno and Clovis I’d always considered the actual thrones to be fairly self-explanatory. Well, that’s the throne for Jesus, obviously.
Then when a friend moved to Fresno from the Bay Area recently, I received a text upon his first visit to a Kuppa Joy. Hey, so what’s the deal with the throne?
Admittedly, it was a question I’d never thought to ask. But outsiders have a way of cutting through the things you normally take for granted like that. Also, as every journalist knows, there are times when you need to ask what feels like a stupid question to get an interesting answer (the Columbo strategy).
This felt like it could be one of those times. And so I put it to Zack Follett, Kuppa Joy’s owner and founder: Hey, what’s the deal with the throne?
First, a little backstory.
Follett has been able to tell his company’s founding story plenty of times before, to media outlets local, regional, national. We probably don’t need to rehash it all here, but the short version goes something like this: Follett was once an infamously hard-hitting middle linebacker, for Clovis High School, then Cal, and eventually the Detroit Lions. Nicknamed “the Pain Train,” he went from a seventh round NFL draft pick in 2009, to cut during pre-season, to rejoining the team, to making starting linebacker in his second year.
Then in 2010 he was carted off the field after a scary helmet-to-helmet hit during kickoff coverage left him temporarily paralyzed. He soon regained feeling and function, but it turned out to be a nagging injury, and he was released by the Lions a year later. After working briefly as an NFL analyst for Sky Sports in London, he found himself at a Costa Coffee in Marlow, England.
Costa is sort of like the Starbucks of the UK, but something about the feeling of fellowship there, and the kindness of the barista that day, stuck with Follett. The way he tells it, that was when God came to him with a plan for his non-football playing future. To go home and open a coffee shop. It didn’t matter that Follett hadn’t been much of a coffee drinker up until that point; it was God’s plan.
“I could still remember what the barista looked like in that coffee shop, because of the service that he gave me,” Follett tells me during a recent phone call. “I think ultimately what led me to that revelation had a lot to do with that barista greeting me with a smile and talking to me about the coffee. It kind of just elevated this natural joy that I was feeling.”
Cup of joy. Kuppa Joy. As origin stories go, it’s pretty straightforward; an easy elevator pitch. And Follett seems a particularly adept pitch man. But back to our original question: what about the throne?
The throne began, Follett says, as a logo. And also as a way to stand out from the crowd. While he never says so explicitly, it also strikes me that a throne makes for unique branding imagery in a way that a cross cannot.
“In the usual kind of Christian coffee shop is crosses. And while the cross is obviously the main source of our Christian faith, it’s played out everywhere,” Follett says. “And so my thing was, I still underestimated people’s viewpoint or stigmas of religion, but I wanted to break through that as much as possible.”
Wanting to defy anti-religious stigmas seems a little at odds with the undisguised religiosity everywhere else inside his cafes – the first thing I saw walking into the Old Town location recently was a t-shirt saying “JESUS ROSE” in big, bold letters – but perhaps boldness was partly a byproduct of success.
Follett describes his inspiration as twofold: that the Christian coffee shops he had been to often didn’t have especially good coffee, and that he didn’t always feel comfortable doing his own Bible study in the secular ones.
“Before Kuppa Joy opened, I remember trying to read my Bible out in public at Starbucks,” Follett says. “And I felt the stares and the uncomfortableness of trying to read my word in public.”
To that end, a throne as a trademark rather than a cross does seem like a good way to stand out from the crowd.
“I’m flying home [from Marlow, England] and now the entrepreneurship wheels are going,” Follett says. “I have nine hours on this flight. I’m writing Kuppa Joy. OK, logo. We got to have a great logo. Joy, joy. The true source of joy comes from God, who was seated on the throne. That’s it! What if we put a coffee cup on a throne and that resembles where our joy comes from? I found a buddy from elementary school that was a graphic designer and he brought it to life and it was kind of born.”
The doubters are a recurring theme of Follett’s origin story – this is a guy, after all, who didn’t grow up particularly religious, but found religion at UC Berkeley, of all places – and they make a brief appearance in the throne chapter as well.
“Now I have a logo and a name that I’m showing to people and getting their feedback, and I got quite a bit of, ‘Bro, that’s dumb. It looks like a furniture store,’” Follett says.
“Well, I took it to one business owner. This was Guy Debbas of Debbas Chocolates in Fresno. He was a neighbor of mine growing up. And he looks at this logo and he goes, ‘You need this throne in your cafe. An actual throne needs to be in your cafe.’”
Whatever you think about Follett’s brand of mixing commercial coffee with religious iconography, it’s hard not to be charmed by this unique ability to move easily from vision to reality. The physical throne mounted on Kuppa Joy’s wall seems as much the physical embodiment of this quality of Follett’s as it is a religious symbol.
Finding a throne guy
Which isn’t to elide the logistical challenges of this, because, somewhere between idea for throne and physical throne, Follett had to figure out how to manufacture a throne. The first step in doing that? You have to find a throne guy.
“So I’m like, ‘That’s a great idea,’” Follett says. “OK, well, how the heck am I going to find this throne? I go and do some research, and I found a throne dealer out of Texas that imported thrones from Asia.”
One minute you’re coming up with a great branding idea, and the next minute you’re talking to a throne dealer out of Texas who imports thrones from Asia. So it goes.
“I found him online, Elegant Accents out of Texas,” Follett says. “‘Hey, these are handmade,’ he says, ‘It’s going to be six months.’ And I say, wonderful. And the crazy story of this was, I’m in the Redwood Forest in Northern California. I’m on a hike with my uncle and my phone rings, and my uncle’s looking at me like, ‘How in the heck do you have service up here? No one gets service out here.’ So I answer it. And it was the delivery guy.
‘Hey, I have this big throne here. I’m at your house. Is anyone home?’ So I called my neighbor, and anyway, they opened the door. I look back at that like, man, that was God. I had that supernatural service to make sure that I received the throne and it wasn’t sent back to Texas.”
Serendipity, Follett’s own ingenuity, and the divine often become intertwined in his stories in this way. Things other people might call a stroke of luck and making the right phone calls, Follett calls “supernatural service.”
As lucky as Follett was to find him, and to take his deliveries on his first try, the throne dealer himself wasn’t so charmed, as it turns out. Elegant Accents closed up shop during the pandemic, Follett says. And this presented a problem for a rapidly growing local coffee chain with franchise aspirations.
“I bought an extra throne from him when I heard. Like, ‘Oh man, let me have one in storage for the next location,’” Follett says.
In another wrinkle, that phone call turned out not to be the last time Follett heard from his throne guy.
“About a year ago, my in-laws are in Dallas and they’re in an Uber and they’re talking with the driver,” Follett says. “’Hey, where you come from? We’re from California.’ ‘Oh, what part?’ ‘Fresno.’ ‘Really? Man, there was this guy there that I used to sell thrones to because he had coffee shops with thrones in it.’”
“And so it turned out they were in that guy’s Uber, my throne dealer, now Uber driver,” Follett says.
Was Jesus ‘a throne guy?’
Aside from the logistics of putting a throne in a coffee shop, which turned out to be a much better story than one might’ve imagined, there’s also a more philosophical question I had about the throne. That question, in its most succinct terms, goes something like, was Jesus, friend to the poor and champion of the downtrodden, really “a throne guy?”
Asked whether this egalitarian conception of Jesus is at odds with the hierarchical aesthetics of a big throne, Follett says, “I understand that viewpoint, but yes, to your point, this is projecting something that I don’t believe even within the Christian faith we do particularly well, which is that he’s the king of kings.”
“There’s a creator that sits on the throne high above, every power and authority submits to him, and that man’s name is Jesus,” Follett says. “A throne represents the supremacy and the kingship of who he was. And so I take great pride of the boldness to proclaim that to a world that does not know.”
You can disagree with Follett’s conclusions, but at the very least, there’s a logic to it. There’s also, I notice again, a practical element.
“Here it is 14 years later, and it’s still coming true that this [coffee shop] was going to be my evangelism piece,” Follett says. “It’s why you’re calling me and asking me why I put this big chair in a coffee shop. I didn’t want the coffee shop to be overly Christian and in your face, but you put a big, beautiful throne in here, people are going to ask, ‘Hey, what’s that chair all about?’ And I can be like, ‘Hey, I’m so happy you asked,’ so then I share the story. And it’s not preaching at them if you ask me the question.”
So perhaps the easiest answer to “what’s the deal with the throne” is: it’s a conversation piece.
Expansion plans
Follett will need to find a new throne guy soon, because Kuppa Joy has big expansion plans – including, in the short-term, a new café on Temperance and 168, and a new “Joy-Thru” at Fowler and Belmont.
“This new cafe, we’re going to be calling it ‘The Cathedral,’” Follett says. “Kuppa Cathedral. It’s going to be more of an old school cathedral vibe interior. And that one, we’re going to be doing a new style of throne that I’m so excited for.”
With Follett, it seems inevitable that this is more than just a styling tweak. It’s part of a grand plan.
“Where I see this going is Kuppa Joy possibly franchising,” Follett says. “I’m taking all the wisdom that God has given me on how to run a successful coffee shop, I package it into a blueprint, and then people come along and we franchise it out to them. And they take our blueprint and they go to Dallas, they go to Oregon, they go wherever. And what we’ve been able to do in Clovis, in the Central Valley, they can go do in their own community.
“I think every Kuppa Joy is different, and I’ve realized that makes things really hard when you try to scale different equipment, different designs. So now with this new cafe, we’re working on cementing the standard blueprint of design and equipment and production for multiple locations.”
In a place like Fresno, where coffee shops with a religious mission are more common than those without (excluding the national chains), Kuppa Joy stands out as both the biggest, and one of the few not owned and/or operated by a specific church (as is the case with The Well on Nees and Clovis, Sanctuary on Barstow and Marks, Frappe House attached to Cross City on Nees near Willow, and others).
“That’s been really intentional,” Follett says. “Churches all have their different things about them, and I think what’s been another sweet thing that I didn’t know would happen, is that Kuppa Joy is kind of a unifier within the body of Christ. There’s different churches, and therefore, oh, we’re on this side and we’re on that side. And look, I’m not on anybody’s side. I’m on Jesus’s side. And so it’s great to see different congregations and pastors come together within and meet inside.”
Follett’s story about feeling uncomfortable reading a Bible inside a coffee shop seems almost an anachronism now. In Fresno and Clovis, it’s far more common to see Bible studies happening in coffee shops than it is not to (at least in this writer’s experience, having spent the better part of 20 years working out of coffee shops). Whether that’s the Kuppa Joy effect directly or something broader is tougher to answer.
“The Well, they opened up a great coffee shop. They wanted that to be a Kuppa Joy. And as much as I would’ve loved to open a Kuppa Joy there, then people would say, ‘Oh, Kuppa Joy is part of The Well,” Follett says. “And I have no disagreeance of how they operate and what they do, but when you’re already representing a religious affiliation, you’re already cutting off a lot. And now if you go and you pick a church within that, you’re going to cut off more.
“So yeah, as we say, we serve all.”
