Roberto Torres, president of Blind Tiger Coffee Roasters, describes the coffee shop in one simple sentence: “Our coffee shops belong to our customers; We’re just the caretakers.” Founded in 2014, the Florida-based coffee shop was born out of Torres’s affinity and appreciation for speakeasies. “Blind Tiger is a euphemism for a speakeasy,” he explained. His commitment to capturing that feeling, bringing it aboveground, and blending it with purpose and culture is what makes Blind Tiger so unique.
The coffee shop adopts a local school in every one of its shops and donates to causes that reflect its three core values: food insecurity, immigration, and social justice. The business is featured in a music video for the re-release of Foreigner’s classic song “I Want to Know What Love Is,” which features a children’s choir from Shriners Hospital. Embracing and subsequently being embraced by the community is the only way Blind Tiger wants to operate. So when it came time to tackle more growth, the business wanted to be strategic.
With 7 locations across the Tampa, FL area, the business has had a unique growth journey. Over ten years ago, it started with Square and grew to five locations in quick succession. But after being approached by a competitor in 2022, the business took a leap and switched point-of-sale systems. By 2025, they happily made a return to Square. “Those were three of the longest years of my life,” said Torres.
Here’s why the business came back:
The challenge: An unstable system that impacted operations
Once COVID-era restrictions were lifted, Torres and team wanted to rethink how they operated the business. Blind Tiger became more of a daytime cafe that offered breakfast and lunch, and as their needs grew, they were looking for ways to scale back expenses in other ways. A competitor came in on the right day, at the right time, and said everything the team needed to hear.
“The team came in and said, ‘Hey, we’ll do interchange plus a quarter of a basis form plus eight pennies, dip, swipe, tap, and everything else. They said we’d save $125,000 a year, and they gave us all the equipment we needed—their salespeople promised us the world. So we did it. Then, from the moment we signed, it was red flag after red flag,” Torres explained.
The implementation took three to four weeks. Unstable networks required them to hardwire their own system; the printers constantly failed and disconnected, making it difficult for staff to fulfill orders. In addition, the entire system would frequently go down, there was poor integration with third-party partners like Uber Eats and DoorDash, and the team constantly felt “nickel and dimed.”
The switch: A seamless sale that prioritized business needs
Near the end of the contract term, Torres and team began looking for new partners and met with a slew of different brands and CEOs for hours, ultimately unable to get the rate and the tools they desired. “Then I started thinking, ‘Why don’t I just go back to Square?’” A little over a week later, he met with River Sava, head of new sales at Square, and signed a new contract, coming back to the company where it all began.
“We met on a Saturday, had a proposal delivered, and by Tuesday. It was so fast,” Torres said. “It never felt like a sale. It felt [River and team] were really looking out for our vested interests and trying to help us get our stuff in order.”
The solution: The return to stability and recouping losses
With Blind Tiger being back on Square, we asked if the business felt as if it’s been able to recoup the money and time that was lost while they were on a different system, and Torres responded with clear certainty: “100% yes.”
Cashiers are able to engage with the community and process orders simultaneously with speed, and their printer issues are a thing of the past. “We’re able to minimize mistakes and missed orders with our sticker printers,” Torres said. “The KDS is also paramount for our staff in getting orders done correctly.”
Correct orders encourage customer retention, and retention is one of the many things Blind Tiger enjoys being able to track through Square. Torres recalled a time in 2019 when he was able to deduce through Square data that a customer had spent over $17k at the coffee shop in one year. He went out of his way to thank the customer by buying them a coffee machine of their own. Convinced it would never taste like Blind Tiger’s, the customer still frequents the shop and even buys large orders before the holiday period, when the shop is closed, so they’ll have it tucked away in the refrigerator.
“We have an email listserv of over 35,000 customers, and we build customer relationships one transaction at a time,” he explained. In-depth customer data allows the shop to take its relationship-building to the next level so that every customer feels inclined to frequent the shop and feel at home.
The impact: Scaling with ‘one less thing to worry about’
Finally reunited with the right tools, the business is now focused on the future, planning to open eight locations within the next 24 months.
We wouldn’t be able to tackle this growth if we didn’t have a reliable partner like Square that we can bring on and give me one less thing to worry about. Our partners manufacturing the espresso machines and grinders are great, but having this tool that we can deploy anywhere and know that it’s going to work is paramount.”
Roberto Torres → President of Blind Tiger Coffee Roasters
The business is also looking into Square Kiosk in its new locations to cater to the customers who may not always want to interact with staff, and also to alleviate staff during busy periods. Being able to leverage reliable tools in different ways throughout the business is one of Torres’ favorite parts about bringing Blind Tiger back to Square. He summed up the return by saying, “It’s not always necessarily about saving money. The idea is to rely on a tool that is going to allow you to be more efficient, like hiring an extra set of hands. That’s how I would define Square.”
