After Foxtrot’s dramatic closure of coffee shops across Dallas in April 2024 — a move so sudden that customers and employees were told to leave in the middle of the business day — company co-founder Mike LaVitola told The Dallas Morning News he expects to reopen at least two of the four locations in North Texas.
Chicago-based LaVitola said he has a “line of sight” to open 12 to 16 of the 33 Foxtrots that shuttered nationwide on April 23, 2024.
The shops will reemerge in Chicago, Austin and Dallas as early as August 2024 in some cases, LaVitola told The News. He wouldn’t say which Dallas-area shops would reopen, or when.
For now, the four Foxtrots in the area remain locked on McKinney Avenue, Knox Street, Greenville Avenue and in Snider Plaza in University Park. Landlords have found it difficult to decide whether to go back into business with the company that cut ties so suddenly, with little explanation.
“It was certainly a shock,” LaVitola said.
“I found out about this at the same time everyone else did.”
How? LaVitola said he wasn’t in a day-to-day role with Foxtrot for the past 18 months. He founded the company with Taylor Bloom in 2014. Foxtrot then merged with Dom’s Market Kitchen & Market in late 2023 and formed a new company called Outfox Hospitality that reportedly raised more than $100 million with intentions to expand. LaVitola said he was “on the periphery” as an advisor since then, including when the closures took place.
“The suddenness of it all was just really hard to conceive,” he said.
Employees, customers and the small-business owners who worked with Foxtrot agreed. Some complained about missed wages and rotting food in the closed shops. Employees filed a class action suit.
After the Foxtrot fall-out, the company sold $2.2 million worth of intellectual property and restaurant equipment in an online foreclosure sale on May 10, 2024. The assets were scooped up by the investment company Further Point Enterprises. Outfox filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection on May 14, 2024.
LaVitola was named executive chairman of Further Point, the new parent company, news stories revealed. And voila, LaVitola is back at Foxtrot.
He’s treating it “like a new startup again,” he told Crain’s Chicago Business.
“I’m excited to get to reset a lot of these relationships,” he told The News. He wouldn’t say how much money Further Point Enterprises raised to try to save the dozen or so Foxtrots on their list.
Some consumers took notice on June 5, 2024, when an Instagram post for @foxtrotmarket announced “a new Foxtrot with some old friends” would be “coming soon.”
None of the four landlords in Dallas and University Park would comment publicly about their status with Foxtrot.
From LaVitola’s point of view, Foxtrot’s best asset was that it sold food made by small, local businesses. Austin-based Tacodeli, for instance, sold its well-liked Salsa Doña on Foxtrot shelves. Beyond the coffee and breakfast tacos available, Foxtrot had a market selling pints of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream, a bouquet of flowers or a snack from a local business owner, like chips or desserts.
“We launched literally hundreds of brands to market. They could take sales data from Foxtrot and get [their products] into Central Market or Whole Foods or Target,” LaVitola said of the company’s genesis. He saw Foxtrot at the center of what he calls the “consumer ecosystem”: too small to compete with big-box stores but large enough to be a starting place for up-and-coming food brands.
“Look, I mean, Foxtrot was the only thing I thought about for almost 10 years,” he told The News.
“Stepping away from that and throwing your hands up just wasn’t the right thing to do.”
We’ll update this story when we know more.
