Since our inception 30 years ago, JJ Bean has constantly strived to improve our food offerings.
Our Apple Cinnamon Cruffin, circa 2017
At the beginning, we had muffins and cookies, but we were buying the dough from someone else and baking them off at our stores. We were also bringing in other people’s sandwiches.
In 2005, we hired Joanne Yau and decided to commit to doing everything in-house at our Main Street location. Joanne improved on all our muffin recipes, created some new ones, and shortly thereafter created our sandwich program. These were game changers that put JJ Bean on the map for more than just coffee.
After growing from four to six locations, we realized that Main Street couldn’t keep up with the production of our growing business, so we opened a production kitchen in August of 2008 on Railway Street. Amanda Buhler took over from Joanne, added our famous wraps, and also created a vegan muffin that has continued for 18 years as our top selling muffin: Zucchini Chocolate Chip.
The final items that were not in house were the croissants and cinnamon buns, which we were able to take on ourselves thanks to the expertise of Jeff Salzsauler. Wow, he knew his dough, and he rose to the occasion!
The JJ croissant: 196 layers of butter in every bite!
As we grew from six to 18 stores, it became clear that Railway wasn’t going to be big enough either. Our new bakery leader, Julie Trottier, was holding the team together through a tough situation, and operations manager Justin White pushed us to get the biggest location possible as a way of honouring our staff and our products. In 2018, we finally opened a 14,000 square foot facility in South Burnaby. This facility had a small café, a bakery area, a kitchen area, a huge freezer, plenty of fridge space, and a warehouse that could handle all of our non-coffee products. We bypassed many of our distributors and started delivering to ourselves. Justin orchestrated logistics to make this dream facility come to fruition.
Our Chorizo Wrap, circa 2018
Julie and her team of 30 people make all our sandwiches & wraps daily, along with the dry and frozen ingredients that allow our stores to bake everything fresh, every day, at our 25 retail stores. On top of that, Julie and her team create an ever-changing menu of delectable items that are updated constantly, keeping us on the forefront of the latest and greatest.
One final note: in 2025 we started making donuts. As usual, these are not just everyday donuts. Julie, Lauren Yu (our Donut Production Manager) and the team make all the fillings from scratch. What a hard job it is, taste-testing these delicious morsels to decide on our seasonal specials.
A selection of Neate Donuts today
Keep enjoying our food!
–John Neate, Jr. (JJ)
JJ Bean would like to thank and honour food program contributors Joanne Yau, Amanda Buhler, Jeff Salzsauler, Justin White, Julie Trottier, & Lauren Yu.