Brief
Structure a progressive, measurable, and realistic expansion beyond Quebec, with Ontario as the priority market
Café Pista is a specialty coffee roaster founded in Montréal, recognized for its strong local roots, distinctive brand universe, and approachable take on specialty coffee. Its ranking as the 34th best coffee shop in North America confirms that the brand has assets that can travel: product quality, a strong identity, accessible expertise, and strong potential for repeat purchases.
Maze was commissioned to define a strategic action plan for expansion beyond Quebec.
Goals
The mandate drew on digital performance, Shopify data, existing organic signals across the rest of Canada, an active B2B presence, and a competitive analysis of target markets with the goal of making Pista easier to understand, more reassuring, and easier to adopt in markets where the brand does not yet benefit from the physical, community, and cultural presence it has established in Quebec.
Complexity and challenge
A brand that had built trust through the physical experience needed to learn how to make itself understood without it
In Quebec, Café Pista benefits from a complete ecosystem, physical cafés, a local community, and word of mouth, that builds trust before a purchase is even made. Across the rest of Canada, none of these points of reference exist yet. The website, subscription offering, B2B channel, and field sales representative therefore had to work together to replace what the physical experience naturally provides in Quebec.
The complexity also stemmed from the nature of the business model itself: a brand whose growth engine relies heavily on customer loyalty cannot apply the same logic in a market where it has yet to build an existing customer base. It was therefore essential to distinguish what could be exported as is from what needed to be rethought for an acquisition-driven context rather than a retention-focused one.
Approach
Combining data, field insights, and market analysis to distinguish what is validated from what remains a hypothesis
The process unfolded in four stages and drew on four sources: sales data from Shopify, analytics data from GA4, a series of workshops with the client team, and comparative market and competitive research. The workshops complemented the quantitative analysis with a qualitative understanding of the company’s internal reality, its growth ambitions, operational constraints, and perceptions of the target markets. The comparative research then helped position the brand within its competitive landscape and identify the specific market-entry codes
of each target region.
All findings were interpreted through a combined UX, CRO, and expansion strategy lens. The UX perspective helped identify the needs and barriers of different customer profiles. Each finding in the report was classified according to its level of evidence: confirmed data, qualitative signal, competitive observation, or hypothesis to validate. This disciplined approach made it possible to propose a clear action plan while allowing the strategy to evolve based on real-world learnings.
Solution
A system, not a collection of channels
The recommendations spanned several workstreams, each led by different teams and operating on different timelines. To prevent them from moving forward in isolation, we structured the strategy around a small set of guiding decisions designed to determine where to focus efforts, what to address before accelerating, and how each workstream should be sequenced in relation to the others.
This approach reflects a simple principle: when resources are limited, sequencing matters just as much as the recommendations themselves. Our guiding decisions therefore focused on geographic prioritization; the order between foundations and amplification, fixing before investing in acquisition; gradually building repeat purchasing rather than promoting it immediately; positioning B2B as an infrastructure in its own right; and defining the conditions required to establish
a human presence in the market.
The objective was not to activate every channel at the same time or with the same intensity, but to assign each one a clear role within a shared progression: make the brand easy to understand, reduce the risk of a first purchase, build local proof, drive repeat purchases, and learn enough from the market to determine when and how to accelerate.
Results
A four-part strategic report and an operational roadmap for implementation
The mandate resulted in a strategic report structured in four parts: an overview of the current situation, an interpretation of what it means, channel-specific execution recommendations, and a roadmap with performance indicators. It was designed to remain accessible to the leadership team while ensuring that every finding could be traced back to its supporting sources.
The report was accompanied by a multi-horizon operational roadmap that distinguishes strategic initiatives from execution steps, giving the client team a practical management tool rather than a static document.