The Plato Coffee expansion story keeps accelerating. The speciality coffee brand founded by brothers Stephan and Petrus Bredell in December 2019 hit 100 South African stores last year, opened its first international location at Newlands Shopping Centre in Harare, and is now actively exploring franchise partnerships across Europe and the Middle East.

According to Stephan Bredell, the company receives roughly 10 franchise applications per day from around the world. Discussions are underway with potential partners in the UK, the Netherlands, the UAE and the USA. No confirmed opening dates yet, but this is clearly no longer a domestic play. Plato is building for global.

What makes the Plato Coffee expansion interesting beyond the brand itself is the pattern it belongs to.

We've been tracking a growing wave of South African entrepreneurs building businesses that reach well beyond the continent. PURA Beverages manufactures in South Africa and exports to the US market. SA founders at Y Combinator are building AI products for global customers from South African roots. 

And now, Plato is taking a franchise-led approach to exporting a consumer brand into some of the most competitive retail markets in the world.

Three different models (franchise, manufacturing, software), same underlying ambition: build it here, sell it everywhere. That shift in mindset, from "build for local" to "build for export," is one of the most significant trends in SA business right now. We first covered Plato's origin story last year, and the speed of what's happened since has been remarkable.

The growth trajectory is unusual for a South African franchise. Most SA coffee brands start in Cape Town or Johannesburg and expand outward slowly. Plato did the opposite, targeting small towns like Rustenburg, Polokwane, Mbombela and Secunda where competition was thin and community was strong. 

That small-town strategy, combined with a franchise model that puts owner-operators at the centre, let the brand scale fast without the overhead of a purely corporate-owned chain.

Plato is also vertically integrated. It roasts its own coffee, operates its own bakery, and supplies its own equipment to franchisees. That level of control is a genuine competitive advantage domestically. It keeps quality consistent and margins healthy across 100+ stores.

The question is whether that model travels.

The UK branded coffee shop market is worth 6.8 billion pounds and has over 12’300 outlets. Costa, Greggs, Pret, Starbucks and fast-growing independents like Black Sheep Coffee dominate a market that added 420 net new stores in the past year alone. 

It is, by any measure, one of the most saturated coffee markets on earth.

Plato's edge in South Africa has been its focus on community. The brand built itself around school runs, small-town gathering spots, and a culture that is deliberately anti-snob. "Coffee sculpted. Community included" is the tagline, and it works in Irene, Secunda and Bedfordview because Plato is known there. 

In London or Manchester, they start from zero brand recognition in a market where consumers already have deep loyalty to established chains.

Franchise-led international expansion adds another layer of complexity. Quality control, brand consistency and customer experience all become harder to manage the further from home you get. And the vertical integration that works so well domestically raises logistical questions internationally. 

From what we understand, the first UK shop will be a South African who’s lived in London for 15 years or more, knows the city, knows all the beats and is confident they can replicate the same community-driven success – only at £4 a cappuccino.

The ambition is clear. Bredell has publicly stated targets of 150 stores by the end of 2026 and 225–250 by the end of 2027 in South Africa alone, alongside the international push. He is also developing two additional sub-brands: a water and wellness offering called Wello and an as-yet-unnamed burger brand, both designed to sit alongside Plato stores and give franchisees multiple revenue streams from a single site.

That is a lot happening simultaneously. Scaling from 100 to 250 domestic stores while launching in four new countries and building two new brands requires deep management capacity and capital. For a bootstrapped franchise operation, the risk is that international expansion distracts from the domestic growth that funds everything else.

None of this is a reason to doubt the brand, though. Plato's track record of going from a container to 100+ stores in five years, with no external funding, is exceptional execution by any standard. But the jump from "fastest-growing SA coffee franchise" to "international lifestyle brand" is a different kind of challenge entirely.

If they pull it off, Plato becomes one of the most compelling SA export stories of the decade. We will be watching closely.

This news first featured in our Feb ‘26 post on 800 times faster insurance quotes in SA.

Get the full picture with our Plato Coffee founder story. Learn how PURA Beverages scaled from SA to the US. And meet the SA team building a restaurant AI phone agent in the US.