PROVO — The new Tahitian Noni Cafe will open Monday inside Tahitian Noni's corporate headquarters in Provo's Riverwoods district, and company officials hope the cafe helps locals learn more about a company that does much of its business overseas.
"A lot of people in Utah County don't know about us," said Tahitian Noni spokesman Mike Weingarten. "We hope the cafe will draw them in to learn more about us."
Cafe director Mike Olsen said the company hopes to open more than 100 cafes around the world in the next five years. The Provo location is the third. The first opened in Tokyo in 2003, and the second debuted in April in Fukuoka, Japan.
The multilevel marketing company flew in more than 2,000 of its top-selling distributors for Friday's ribbon-cutting extravaganza, which included appearances by Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and Provo Mayor Lewis Billings. Instead of cutting ribbon, the dignitaries were presented machetes and cut a Tahitian tea leaf vine.
A group of Polynesian dancers and drummers included former Brigham Young University football player Setema Gali and former BYU basketball player Marc Roberts. (Weingarten himself is a recent BYU baseball player.)
The cafe's menu includes drinks and breakfast, lunch and dinner menus intended to be a friendly hangout, as well as a place to show off Tahitian Noni's products and educate the curious. Patrons will pass through a new visitor's center to get to the cafe.
"This is a tremendous opportunity for people in Provo and Utah to see what's going on," Olsen said.
Visitors won't have to worry about being approached by distributors trying to get them to join the business, he added.
"Our very first rule is the cafe will not be a place where customers feel intimidated or threatened."
The visitor's center includes videos and touch-screen presentations about the history of the company and of French Polynesia, where the company harvests the grenade-sized noni fruit used in its Tahitian Noni Juice, which it claims provides health benefits. Someone buys a bottle of Tahitian Noni Juice every 1.7 seconds. A bottle sells for about $45 and lasts for several weeks.
Olsen said Tahitian Noni Cafes will open in Munich, Sao Paolo and Nagoya in September and in Dallas and Atlanta in October. A ninth cafe will open in Taipei later in the year.
"Tokyo's chic restaurant featuring the benefits of Noni and the culture of Tahiti was so successful we decided to take it worldwide," company president Kelly Olsen said.
The cafes will feature fruit smoothie drinks and frozen yogurt desserts fortified with Tahitian Noni Juice concentrate, as well as healthy sandwiches, salads, muffins and cookies. Many of the drinks are based on Tahitian noni leaf herbal tea.
"We thought the cafe might be a little bit of a struggle here (in Provo) because of the tea concept," Mike Olsen said, "but that is not at all the case."
The cafe's hours will be 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. until July 11, when it will open daily from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Distributors believe cafes in their areas will help them build their businesses.
"We're looking forward to it," said John Merritt, a postal worker from Dallas. "People believe what they can see and touch. The cafe will give them an opportunity to test the products. When they learn about Tahitian noni they'll have somewhere to go in and sit down and see for themselves."
The distributors in town this weekend came from 63 countries and are staying at company expense at the Grand America and Little America hotels in Salt Lake City.
Founded in 1996, Tahitian Noni International's growth oustripped every other American company during its first five years. The company now has annual revenues of $550 million with more than 1.3 million distributors in 73 countries.
E-mail: twalch@desnews.com