Operator profile: JAAQ Coffee

Henry Norman speaks to Tim Axe, managing director of The Genuine Dining Co, about the new mental health coffee shop that has just opened in east London...

When sifting through the potential candidates for these profiles, it is handy if they have some sort of ‘hook’ to make them interesting or relevant (or maybe even both). Some more obvious examples would be an innovative use of technology. Or a new opening. Or an initiative that supports a good cause. But it’s rare that you get wind of a launch that combines all three.

Well, The Genuine Dining Co has just announced a new partnership with Just Ask A Question (JAAQ), a brand-new mental health platform that offers answers to 50,000 interactive questions across 50 topics, ranging from depression to the menopause (check). They have just combined with the contract caterer’s clients The Office Group (TOG) and For a to launch a new mental health café, JAAQ Coffee, in Whitechapel (check). And all of the proceeds will go towards helping the charity to grow its important work (check).

There’s clearly a lot to unpack here, so I swing by the new outlet, which is right next to fashionable Shoreditch in east London – an area known for its great coffee and food, as well as its large office population – to meet Tim Axe, the managing director of The Genuine Dining Co.

“We feed people at work,” he explains of his own company’s background. “We work with the likes of Spotify and News UK in creating experiences around food, which both encourages people back to the office and gives them nutrition and sustenance while they are there.”

In the case of the new café, which is also open to the public, this will be done by serving up JAAQ coffee, teas and drinks, as well as a range of local cakes, pastries, healthy snacks and salads. However, there will be a lot more on offer than merely the refreshments.

“Come back from lockdown, it was quite a stop-start approach across our sector,” explains Tim. “Also, people were expected to work incredibly hard, having been through, frankly, hell, for the last two years. We were trying to find ways in which we could support people through mental health initiatives.”

As a result, The Genuine Dining Co began looking to form new partnerships, which was how it came across JAAQ, whose mission it is to break the stigma around conversations about mental health. “We were talking to them about how their quite incredible platform could support our teams, and over several months we realised that the main way that you strike up a conversation with someone is to go and grab a coffee,” continues Tim. “So we created JAAQ Coffee, and it’s incredibly exciting to be a part of it, because they are genuinely doing something unique, on something that should be tackled across the globe.”

When the working world started to reawaken following the last lockdown, I have to admit, I did wonder if companies would still have the time and commitment to pursue these kinds of altruistic initiatives. However, Tim reasons that, instead of pushing them down the list of priorities, it has made this focus more crucial than ever.

“The most important facet of hospitality is its people,” he reasons. “If we’re not supporting their mental and physical health, then we are letting down the hospitality industry, which is why something like JAAQ is so important.

“In this industry, you can get lost in lots of conversations about new tech, efficiency and all this good stuff. However, fundamentally it’s about people who deliver brilliant hospitality via conversation and engaging with people to create that emotional relationship with each individual customer.”

This isn’t to say, however, that JAAQ Coffee won’t utilise the very latest in technology. Indeed, in order to deliver its message, it features interactive screens with free access to the JAAQ app and its brand-new voice recognition and AI technology.

“It’s a free-to-use platform,” elaborates Tim. “It’s obviously online, but in wanting to break the stigma around talking about mental health, we felt we needed to expose that conversation as much as possible.”

This means that in the Whitechapel coffee shop, the technology takes the form of a huge interactive screen with a directional speaker above the user’s head. “This means you’re not in a booth having a private conversation,” says Tim. “There are no barriers to it and you don’t feel like you are doing something discreet, which is an important part, we think, of breaking down the barriers.”

The ultimate goal of all of this, though, is not to fix people’s mental health. It’s to limit the amount of time between someone unfortunately experiencing a problem and that developing into a crisis point.

“Typically, that takes 10 years,” says Tim. “When you hit crisis point, you get referred to a doctor and it takes a number of months within our current healthcare system to get seen.”

JAAQ, however, can help to speed up this process by offering free information from a wide variety of experts, as well as from people who have been impacted by different mental health issues. “As opposed to from, say, a TikToker who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about, but their job is to get hits,” says Tim.

And the great news, as previously mentioned, is that this incredible resource will be available to members of the public, as well as TOG workers. “Some of our client sites with The Office Group [there are 14 in total] are, because of where they are, open to the public,” says Tim. “While we want to role this out for our business and our teams, the most important thing is to make sure JAAQ is available to as many people as possible. Therefore, being open to the public is a brilliant way of doing that.”

This dedication extends to the fact that the specialist barista team at the outlet are all also mental-health first aiders, which means they are trained to recognise signs of emotional distress. In practice, this could take the form of having an initial conversation or directing a customer to the AI technology that is available in-store. “Not only do they have the answers for our customers and partners, it’s also a key investment on their personal behalf and for their growth and development,” says Tim.

Looking to the future, the good news for those who aren’t located in the east London area is that there are already plans to open a further six coffee shops in and around the capital next year. “Our focus is to work with our existing client base to celebrate the values and the mission of JAAQ,” concludes Tim commendably. “I don’t think there is any corporate organisation that doesn’t want to invest in mental wellbeing. The more we can work with our partners on JAAQ, the more benefit, we think, the population as a whole will get.”

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