New Love Coffee branches into wholesale coffee with Zags Collective

New Love Coffee started off as two separate pandemic projects for husband and wife Ike and Tiffany Bubna. Tiffany threw herself into baking – something she had always loved – while Ike returned to his love of coffee by roasting his own beans at home.

“I had a 1-pound coffee roaster set up in my garage, and actually roasted 500 roasts on that, developing the coffee for New Love before I opened up the shops,” Ike said. “I worked on it for a long time, giving coffee to friends and remembering going into coffee shops, why I liked it. It became a new love.”

In 2022, Tiffany attended pastry school at Spokane Community College while the two opened New Love Coffee’s first location and coffee roaster in Liberty Lake. Since then, they’ve purchased Bean & Pie and opened two more New Love Coffee locations in Kendall Yards and north Spokane. Their next step? An online store, and they were looking for a creative wholesale partner. They landed on partnering with Zags Collective; every purchase supports the name, image, likeness group that benefits Gonzaga University student -athletes.

“It was like, ‘Why not the Zags?’” Ike said. “Fantastic brand, I love their sports teams, and so I can help support them.”

Ike says New Love Coffee focuses on creating welcoming spaces where you can drink delicious-yet-accessible coffee and grab a sweet or savory pie.

“A lot of what I’m trying to shoot for is something that is a great exit out of the highly sugary giant drinks into like, ‘Hey, I want to know what coffee is about,’” Ike said. “All of our stuff is single origin, but it’s also not so nerdy or pretentious.”

One thing you won’t hear at New Love Coffee? Blenders. Ike said he knew they didn’t want to have blended drinks because the noise makes it difficult for baristas to have conversations with clients.

Ike first got into coffee when working for Starbucks in 2005. He said that he loved the community the company used to create, but as he felt them moving away from that, he became disenchanted. Later, he had experience working for various coffee companies in Seattle, including a nonprofit that worked with at-risk youth – a model he would like to eventually implement in the Francis Avenue location.

“If I’m going to do an internship program, I wanted to be able to have the capacity to train at a drive-thru,” Ike said.

The baked goods from Bean & Pie are available at all New Love Coffee locations. Since buying the business, Tiffany has added flavors to the list, focusing on using seasonal ingredients by partnering with LINC Foods. But her favorite is still cran-raspberry.

“The cran-raspberry pie is the pie that made us buy the business,” Tiffany said. “We were ordering hand pies from Bean & Pie for our shop, and we ordered a cran-raspberry pie for Thanksgiving that year. It was so freaking good.”

If you want a pie for any holiday gatherings, Tiffany suggests pre-ordering on the Bean & Pie website.