In 2020, college friends Vinay Menda and Issam Freiha started selling coffee from an electric-powered green cart in Brooklyn, New York. At the time, the pair had been working in venture capital and iterating on the logistics of a new coffee chain. Menda and Freiha sought to develop an affordable competitor to the large coffee chains like Starbucks and Dunkin’ in the US. They had been inspired by mobile food and beverage businesses that were prominent in Asia. The result of their efforts is Blank Street Coffee, which has graduated from the mobile cart into a near-omnipresent force in various…

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