Fort Myers' New Coffee Row: What's Opening Along Cleveland Avenue This Fall

Drive Cleveland Avenue past Edison Mall this month and you'll pass three construction sites that have nothing to do with each other on paper. A gutted gas station. A drive-thru barbecue stand torn down and rebuilt as something else. A brand-new apartment complex with a coffee shop already pouring drinks inside it. Three different property histories, three different owners, three different reasons someone decided this particular stretch of U.S. 41 was worth the investment.

They're all coffee shops. And that's not a coincidence you can wave off as "everyone loves coffee." Three unrelated operators picked the same three-quarter-mile corridor within months of each other, and each one is betting on a different reason you'll actually stop the car. Read them side by side and you get a clearer picture of how this stretch of Fort Myers works day to day than any single opening ever could.

Three Different Reasons to Pull Off Cleveland Avenue

Here's what's actually landing along Cleveland Avenue, and what each one is built for:

None of these three is trying to be the other. 7 Brew runs double drive-thru lanes with no indoor seating at all, built for the driver who wants a custom order handed through the window without slowing their morning down. Foxtail is the opposite instinct entirely: a 1,745-square-foot café built for people who plan to sit, plug in, and stay a while. Urban Buzz sits in between, a drive-thru with a devoted local following that treats the exchange with the "Buzzista" at the window as part of the product.

That's the detail that makes this more than a roundup of new business signage. A corridor doesn't attract three different formats by accident. It attracts them when the traffic passing through is diverse enough to support all three at once, commuters, students, families, remote workers, each wanting something different out of the same five minutes.

The Landowner Who Said No to a Barber Shop

The 7 Brew site has the most interesting backstory, and it belongs to the landowner, not the coffee chain. Sana Abuoqab's company, S&O Ranch LLC, has owned that corner lot across from Edison Mall since 2022. For four years it sat vacant. She had offers. Barbershops wanted in. Restaurants wanted in. She turned them down.

Her reasoning, in her own words, was that she wanted "somebody who would be there long term and that would boost the whole area." That's not a landlord chasing the first signed lease. That's someone reading the corridor and deciding a fast-growing national drive-thru chain with a proven customer base would do more for the block than a quick local tenant might.

By June 2026, the old gas station was demolished, permits and licenses were in hand, and the timeline from lease to open was estimated at around 150 days. If that holds, the stand should be pouring drinks well before the year is out.

A Family That Wants the Competition

Urban Buzz Coffee Co. isn't a chain chasing a hot market. It's the Eble family, who left Colorado Springs for Cape Coral after Jeff Eble's heart transplant surgery sent them looking for lower altitude. Their first Urban Buzz opened there in 2020. Their second landed at University Village near Florida Gulf Coast University in January 2024, run by son Alex Eble, with his younger brother Adam managing the original Cape Coral store. Sharon and Jeff work behind the scenes as chief financial officer and franchise developer.

The Cleveland Avenue location, going in on the old BurgerQue lot, is their third. Construction has run behind schedule because the city required a retaining wall before the site could move forward. That kind of delay is easy to read as a setback. Adam Eble doesn't read it that way. Asked about landing directly between 7 Brew and Foxtail on the same road, he said, "We want some competition. We want to be better every single day. We're excited. We can't wait for it to be open."

That's a family business choosing to build eight parcels from a Fortune-tracked national chain on purpose, because they'd rather compete on a corridor with proven traffic than open somewhere quiet and hope people find them.

Coffee As the First Business Through the Door

The Foxtail Coffee opening on August 5 ties this whole stretch to something bigger than caffeine. Its address, 3605 Cleveland Avenue, sits inside Latimer Crossing, a new 92-unit mixed-income community built by the Southwest Florida Housing Foundation on land that had sat vacant for more than a decade. Foxtail is one of the first commercial tenants to open inside it, which means a coffee shop is functioning as the opening act for a much larger residential project.

Owners Diana and Scott Willis, who also run several Jason's Deli locations across Lee County and Naples, picked the spot deliberately. Diana Willis has said she likes being "on the morning drive side for people going toward downtown," a read on traffic patterns that matters more to a café than square footage does. This is her fourth Southwest Florida location, following stores in Cape Coral, North Naples, and the Estero Plaza café that opened near Florida Gulf Coast University in April 2026.

Put together, the three openings sketch a corridor in transition. A vacant gas station lot, a shuttered barbecue drive-thru, and a decade-empty parcel have all found new life within months of each other, and coffee got there first in all three cases. That's usually how these things go. Coffee shops carry low overhead and fast build times compared to a full restaurant, so they're often the first sign that a stretch of road is worth a bigger bet.

If you drive Cleveland Avenue toward Edison Mall on your way to work, you're about to have three genuinely different stops to choose from within less than a mile, and each one is built for a different version of your morning. Whether that's a sign of more to come along this corridor is worth watching. For now, it's simply a more interesting stretch of road than it was six months ago.

I keep an eye on changes like this because they tell you something about where Fort Myers is headed block by block, not just on a market report. If you're curious what a shift like this means for a specific street or neighborhood you're watching, or you just want to talk through what's happening near you, Alicia Lee would love to connect. Let's Connect.