The Idea

In 2002, Kaspar Basse was in his early thirties, freshly bought out of the Copenhagen web agency he'd co-founded, and had no idea what to do next. He'd spent years fighting for the Danish national karate team, which made him obsessive about nutrients and vitamins, and endlessly frustrated that actually eating enough fruit and veg was so hard. He came from a business family. His father Jørgen ran the department store Magasin. His mother Anne-Lise sold for IBM. Neither had sold a smoothie.

Basse had been watching Starbucks and the little cafés tucked inside clothing stores, and he went to two friends who ran a shop called Rue Verté on Ny Østergade in central Copenhagen with a pitch: let me put a juice bar in here. His cousin Morten "Morty" Basse was meant to do it with him. Morty's parents thought it was a terrible idea and told him to finish his education. Morty went to Nice to work as a chef instead. Basse opened alone, and by his own account had no real idea how to run the store he'd just opened.

This was the beginning of JOE & THE JUICE.

The Execution

• 2002: The first store opens inside a clothing shop on Ny Østergade, Copenhagen. Morty came back from Nice after three months and became employee number two. The branded cups came later; for years the team hand-stickered every single one.
• 2004: Basse needed cover for a Saturday so he could go to his mother's birthday. He couldn't afford another employee, so a regular customer, Philip Finsteen, offered to fill in, and tripled the store's sales in a single day on charisma alone. Basse stopped optimising the product and started hiring for personality.
• 2009: First store outside Denmark opens on Regent Street in London. Scandinavia had been the proving ground. London was the bet that the format travelled.
• 2013: Swedish PE firm Valedo Partners buys the business for $48 million. Basse holds on to 10%.
• October 2016: General Atlantic invests to fund the US push. Internally, the Spring Street opening in New York was treated as pass or fail for the whole international thesis. Staff were shipped out from other markets to prop it up, and the company openly describes the period as the anxiety of hitting the wall. Spring Street worked.
• 2020 to 2021: The near-death chapter. Dine-in shut, group revenue fell 15% in 2020, and the UK arm had to raise an extra £23.6 million from shareholders just to secure its cash position. The group posted a DKK 233 million net loss in 2021. Basse handed the CEO job to Thomas Nørøxe in June 2021 and stayed on as chairman.
• 2023: The turnaround lands. Revenue jumps 42% to over DKK 2.4 billion, and EBIT turns positive for the first time in years at DKK 178 million, across 363 stores. Same year, the chain walked out of the Australian market with no warning.
• November 2023: General Atlantic buys a majority stake from Valedo for $641 million.
• July 2025: Bloomberg reports General Atlantic is lining up a US listing for as early as 2026, at a rumoured $2.4 billion.
• April 2026: Abu Dhabi's Emirates International Investment Company takes a strategic minority stake at a $1.8 billion valuation, with General Atlantic staying majority owner. 2025 revenue was DKK 3.3 billion, up 16.5%, with EBIT up 19% to DKK 204.6 million and same-store sales up 6%.
• Today: Past 500 stores across 23 markets, roughly $500 million in annual sales, and a target of 1,000 cafés by 2028.

The lesson?

Basse spent two years perfecting juice. Then a customer covered one Saturday shift, tripled the takings, and taught him the actual product was the person behind the bar. Twenty years later, 70% of the management team had started as juicers. Most founders treat hiring as the thing you do once the model works. For Joe, the hiring was the model. He didn't scale a recipe. He scaled a Saturday shift.