Taking on Thailand: How Bartels is redefining neighbourhood places through food and community
Insights from the C9 Sessions – Phuket Real Estate Forum 2025
When Nikolai Bartels stepped onto the stage at this year’s C9 Sessions – Phuket Real Estate Forum 2025, he didn’t present slides, charts, or market forecasts. Instead, he offered something far more valuable: a blueprint for how a food-driven, neighbourhood-centric brand can scale across Thailand by prioritising community, routine, and authenticity over traditional real estate logic.
Bartels arrived in Thailand five years ago with his wife, leaving behind corporate careers in Denmark to pursue a different kind of life. What followed is now a familiar entrepreneurial leap: launching a café brand in the middle of Covid-19. But at C9 Sessions, it became clear that the real story isn’t about cafés—it’s about building places where daily life unfolds.
He shared with the audience…
“We weren’t trying to build a product. We were trying to build a place where people could genuinely be themselves—across generations, across lifestyles, across daily routines.”
The mission wasn’t to chase the busiest corners or the flashiest streets. It was to position the brand where life actually happens.
That philosophy shaped the company’s first Bangkok site in Sukhumvit. By conventional commercial criteria, it was the wrong choice: minimal foot traffic, no parking, flooding issues, and located on the “wrong” side of the street. But Bartels trusted instinct over spreadsheets.
“The building felt right. The neighbourhood felt right. I knew the numbers didn’t justify it, but the energy did. Sometimes you have to bet on what you can feel—but not yet measure.”
The bet paid off. Today, the company employs 400 people, operates across Bangkok, Phuket, and Saigon, and produces 1,500 kilogrammes of sourdough every day. But scale alone was not what resonated at C9 Sessions—it was the clarity of Bartels’ operating philosophy: atmosphere beats architecture, and life patterns beat prime locations.
“We learned quickly that neighbourhoods outperform foot traffic in our world. People don’t need us on the corner—they need us in their daily routines. That’s where the long-term value lives.”
This insight is especially relevant to Thailand’s next chapter. Phuket’s transformation from a tourism-led island to an all-year residential hub mirrors the exact conditions where Bartels thrives. New neighbourhoods, new residents, and new routines are emerging, forming fertile ground for lifestyle-driven places anchored by food, comfort, and community.
At the forum, Nikolai made his optimism explicit.
“Phuket is moving from being a place people visit to a place people live. When new neighbourhoods form, it creates long-term demand—and that’s exactly the ecosystem we are built for.”
For Bartels, Thailand isn’t a market to simply expand into; it’s a landscape of micro-communities waiting to be understood. Success isn’t measured by store count—it’s measured by how deeply the brand embeds itself into everyday life: morning rituals, gym stops, dog walks, school runs, and weekend gatherings.
If C9 Sessions revealed anything, it’s that Bartels isn’t just opening more cafés. He’s reshaping how neighbourhood places in Thailand come to life—one community, one building, and one daily routine at a time.
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