She began distributing a little newsletter, loaded with breezy reading material, to restaurants, coffee shops, barber shops - even hospital waiting rooms. She called it Coffee News. Pretty soon, other businesses started calling her, asking for copies to give to their customers, and it wasn’t long before she was selling Coffee News franchises all across Canada.

Coffee News contains light content, surrounded by neighborhood ads.

When Baum died of cancer in 2007, Bill Buckley purchased worldwide distribution rights. The former potato farmer in the northeastern state of Maine had obtained the first Coffee News franchise in the United States 12 years earlier.

Just this week, his representative signed up the first Coffee News franchise in Congo, which joins 300 other overseas outlets in 20 countries.

The lighthearted reading material in Coffee News is still produced in Winnipeg, then edited in Maine by Buckley’s wife, Sue-Ann. Franchisees pay $8,500 for the right to distribute the publication in territories of up to 50,000 people. The franchisees sell the ads and insert them into the newsletter.

Readers get something new and light, advertisers get a captive audience for their messages, and, if all goes well over the course of a year, the franchisee makes a good living.