Abue’s Coffee
How to start a pop up coffee concept from a place of passion and scale it into a real business
📍 Los Angeles, CA
🔗 hotplate.com/abuescoffee
Meet Maria Legarda
Maria is an actress, content creator and coffee lover living in Los Angeles. She’s spent years building up a community of followers on Instagram and Tik Tok, as well as a Substack. Food plays a major role in her life and her content, so sharing Colombian recipes has become a pillar of her content.
Starting Abue’s Coffee Through Content
Coffee has always been a passion for Maria: not only through a love of actual Colombian coffee, but also the tradition of gathering friends and family over drinks and food. After years of informally gathering friends in her home, Maria decided to give her “home cafe” a name: Abue’s, after her grandmother. She started filming videos and sharing the process of turning her home into a Colombian coffee bar. She’d come up with special drink menus and create huge Colombian brunch spreads to serve her house full of guests. While followers were encouraging and asking for more, Maria was discovering that she loved the process of hosting these events for her friends. With that new spark, she decided to take the steps to turn Abue’s into a real business.
Planning the First Coffee Pop Up
With an audience of people watching and waiting for the opportunity to try Abue’s themselves, Maria knew that she wanted to make her first sale as accessible as possible to her followers. She decided the first public experience of Abue’s would be a pop up: she would bring all her equipment to another location, publish a small drink menu ahead of time, and invite followers to preorder drinks for pickup at the pop up.
For her first event in June 2026, she partnered with a friend who owns a local furniture shop, Lone Fox.
The space had all the makings of a good pop up location:
Centrally located in a neighborhood
Plenty of parking
Easy to see from the street
Has a large open area for people to gather
She picked a date and 4 hour time window to pop up. With location out of the way, she got to work thinking about how the actual event would run.
Designing a first menu for operations
When coffee is your passion, it’s easy to dream about all the drinks you want to make, but its important to design your first menu with operations in mind. Maria built a following by sharing recipes for syrups and cold foams, so it was important to her to showcase flavors from her most popular videos. She selected 3 syrups and 3 cold foams, each of which could be a combined with espresso or matcha, leading to a final menu of 6 drinks.
She also decided to add 1 food item - a coconut flan - which she could make ahead 2 days of time, portion into boxes, and store in the fridge until customers picked up.
Having a small menu doesn’t limit your business. In fact, a smaller menu makes it easier for customers to make decisions and check out quickly! Focusing on only 3 syrups and cold foams also meant Maria could save time prepping in the kitchen.
Why “pre-order only”
As with any first time doing anything, it’s hard to know what to expect. Will people show up? Will they come all at once? What if I run out of syrups too early? Instead of making guesses about these unknowns, Maria decided to invite all her customers to pre-order their drinks before they even arrive.
The perks of the pre-order model:
No prep guesswork: Maria would know ahead of time how much of each syrup and cold foam she needs to prep
No rushes or lines: Maria could require customers to selected a designated 15 minute window to pick up their drink so the flow of customers would be steady, and there wouldn’t be any lulls or rushes.
No dealing with payments: With all the orders already paid for, Maria could focus on making drinks and interacting with customers instead of dealing with cards and cash.
Marketing the First Pop Up
The “success” of a first pop up largely depends on how you market the pre-orders ahead of time. Instead of focusing efforts around getting people to come to an event, your efforts should revolve around encouraging customers to pre-order in the days leading up to the pop up.
A week before opening orders, Maria put up a story and reel to let followers know that Abue’s, a concept they’ve seen her host at home, is going to be available to the public. She shared her Hotplate storefront and instructed followers to subscribe so they could get a text when its finally time to order.
When her pre-orders when live, everyone subscribed got a text with a link to her menu. Within minutes, people were placing orders, and within 12 hours, she was completely sold out.
The “right” Equipment
There’s no shortage of tools and gadgets you can buy for a coffee business, but its hard to know what you’ll really need until you’ve spent hours making drinks for people. Maria decided to run one pop up with her existing tools. before choosing what equipment to really invest in.
Here’s what she used for her first event:
2 Ninja Espresso Machines
2 large coolers (to hold ice, milks, and cold foam)
2 shot glasses to pull espresso into
2 1-Pint Mason Jars for shaking espresso
Plain white cups she branded with homemade printed stickers
An A frame sign to put on the street
An iPad to display Hotplate order tickets
Plain cups + straws she customized with Abue’s stickers
1 matcha set up (with a bowl, kettle, whisk)
For her second pop up, she chose to invest in:
Higher quality coolers that keep ice frozen longer
insulated canisters to dispense cold foam
Portion spoons for measuring syrups
Bar mats to line the counter
Dish towels (to mop up quick spills)
Duplicates of every jar, spoon, and glass so that she could make more drinks before she had to do dishes
Success of the first pop up
Maria knew exactly how many people were coming and how many of each drink she needed to make days before her event. So when Maria arrived to the pop up location, all she had to do was set up the coffee station and wait for the first customers to arrive.
Each customer that arrived at their designated pickup window, checked in with Maria’s assistant and gave their first name. Her assistant then quickly pulled up their Hotplate order ticket on the iPad and told Maria which drink to make. A few minutes later, the customer had a drink in their hand!
Scaling Through Consistency
Maria’s goal is to turn Abue’s into a real business and reliable source of income. The path for the next year looks like consistently running pop ups and growing her following - both on the Abue’s Instagram page and her Hotplate subscriber list. The number one way that coffee pop ups like Abue’s are able to grow is through hosting pop ups or offering pre-orders for pick up on a somewhat consistent schedule so that customers can build a habit and excitement around buying that coffee. With every sale over the next year, Maria will grow her community of people who love her coffee and feel a part of her journey to grow the business.
Is a coffee shop the goal?
That’s the question a lot of customers and followers ask, and the answer is “maybe!”. Brick and Mortar locations have much higher start up and operating costs than a pop up while offering far less flexibility. Over the next year as Maria runs her pop ups consistently, she’ll be able to learn what customers like, what systems work best for her, and also what she personally enjoys about the business. If and when she does decide to open a permanent location, she can be confident that the customer base she built throughout her time as a pop up will become her first supporters when she opens her doors.
A note on pop up legality and permitting
Be advised that every state and county have their own regulations when it comes to making and serving drinks or food to customers. Please inquire with your local health department.
A good place to start would be to search “home cafe business + [NAME OF COUNTY]. Many home coffee operations fall under “Cottage Food” or “MEHKO” licenses, so you can review those options as well.
