When you chat with owners and employees at Cayce’s Piecewise Coffee Co., the word “community” often pops up.
And in a recent poll of readers of The State, the community showed its love for the shop.
Piecewise emerged as the winner of The State’s recent reader poll on the Midlands’ favorite coffee shops. Nineteen local coffee shops were listed in the poll, and more than 30,000 votes were cast. When the smoke cleared, Piecewise came out on top, with 40% — more than 12,000 — of the votes.
West Columbia’s Brickhouse Gourmet Coffee was second with 28% of the votes, and the Coffee Shelf, Loveland Coffee and Oliver Gospel Roastery tied for third with 6% each.
Piecewise, located at 2001 State St. in Cayce, was bustling on a recent Wednesday morning. There were baristas crafting hot and cold beverages — items on the pumpkin- and Japanese sweet potato-infused special fall menu are a current favorite — and customers filling the seats of nearby tables; friends catching up with each other and remote workers tacking away on laptops.
In the midst of it all was Jacob Kirby, who co-owns Piecewise with twin brother, Zach, making drinks, chatting with colleagues and wiping down tables and chairs on the sidewalk outside the shop. The Kirby brothers bought Piecewise in September 2022 from original owners Lindsey and Stanton Scoma, who initially opened the shop in 2019.
Jacob Kirby said it felt good to see Piecewise climb to the top of the newspaper’s recent reader poll.
“My brother and I are both from Columbia, so for us it’s really rewarding to feel like the community here is showing support for what has been going on at Piecewise,” Kirby said.
The Kirby brothers are 29, and Jacob said they have been talking about having their own coffee shop since they were 19. They were regular customers at Piecewise in recent years, and in 2022, when the opportunity arose to purchase the Cayce shop, they took that leap into ownership.
“When that opportunity kind of showed up, we were kind of like, ‘Can we pull this off right now? Can we tackle this?,’” Jacob Kirby said. “Luckily we have such a great team here. We inherited a really amazing team. Our managers here, Kaden (Parham) and Zoe (Ebo) were totally instrumental to us even pulling it off, at all. I tell them every day that we couldn’t have pulled this off without them.”
Ebo has been working for Piecewise since it opened in 2019. She said it was encouraging to see the support the Cayce shop gathered in the recent coffee poll.
“I think it’s pretty neat,” Ebo said. “Especially since we’re such a small shop outside of the (downtown) Columbia area. You might not even know we were here unless you drove outside the downtown.”
As Piecewise has established a foothold in Cayce since 2019, and the Kirby brothers have adjusted to ownership during the last year, Jacob Kirby said they are beginning to take a look into the future. While there are no concrete plans in place, he didn’t rule out establishing another Piecewise location at some point down the road.
“We are looking at the coffee landscape in Columbia and trying to identify whether there are parts of town that don’t have a local option,” he said. “There are a lot of parts of town that do have a local option, and we aren’t trying to go in and put ourselves next door to another local choice. ... What we are trying to find out is, in the Midlands, where there are areas that don’t have a real local option, and if there’s an opportunity for us to put another one of these there, maybe.”
Piecewise is open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday.
This story was originally published October 5, 2023, 5:30 AM.