Blue Bottle Planning 5,000-s.f. Washington DC Café and Training Center

Blue Bottle’s recently opened South Park San Francisco café, which includes the company’s first “cold bar” concept. Blue Bottle Coffee photo.

Following a series of high-profile openings in New York, the Bay Area and Tokyo this past fall and early winter, Oakland-based Blue Bottle Coffee is heading for the first time into the Washington D.C. market.

The creative culinary hub and vendor marketplace Union Market has announced that Blue Bottle is planning a 5,000-square-foot café and training center, scheduled to open in late Spring 2017. It would be the company’s first storefront outside the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and Japan markets, and the Union Market/Blue Bottle joint announcement hinted that others are likely to follow.

Blue Bottle at the Shinagawa train station, Tokyo. Blue Bottle Coffee photo.

“The spacious location will span two floors and include a public cafe, training lab, classrooms, and offices,” the announcement stated. “It will serve as a central hub for nearby Blue Bottle cafes that are scheduled to open later that year.”

Since its latest round of investment funding — a $70 million deal led by Fidelity Management and research that brought the company’s investment capital total to $116 million over three rounds since 2012 — Blue Bottle has made several prominent acquisitions of coffee-related businesses, while focusing much of its growth on upscale retail store openings.

Blue Bottle Coffee in Berkeley. Blue Bottle photo.

From this past summer to today, Blue Bottle has opened three shops in Tokyo (Shinagawa Train Station, Nakameguro and Roppongi), one in New York (Park Slope, Brooklyn) and two in the Bay Area (Berkeley and San Francisco’s South Park). The company’s worldwide retail store total is now up to 29, with at least three more planned for Los Angeles, one for New York (Bushwick, Brooklyn), plus the Washington D.C store.