The Zoie Co-founders love food, desserts and each other... the vital ingredients for a Zoie Life!

Our Story: How Zoie came to be

As a family business, the possibility of Zoie began when Maricar and Scott met on their first date – September 22nd, 2009. After a great meal at an Asian fusion restaurant in Darling Harbour, Kobe Jones, Scott invited Maricar to continue the evening at a nearby café. She accepted and there they discovered a joint passion for hot chocolate and rich, indulgent desserts. As time went on, they went on many food adventures together. Trips to cafes and restaurants, enjoying sweet and savoury taste sensations became part of their celebration ritual – when they got engaged, when Maricar received a promotion to a Project Management position, and when they found out they were going to be parents. They loved how food added to memorable moments; and through conversations over food, they realised that they both shared a dream of someday having their own café to create memorable moments for other people.

The Beginning

In 2017 an opportunity arose to tender for the café space attached to the Scarborough Beach Pool. Maricar and Scott were living in Sydney at the time and getting pressure from the grandparents to move back to Scott’s hometown of Perth. Their original plan was to look at opening a café once their daughter had reached school age (she was only 18 months old at the time), but on a visit back to Perth they fell in love with the idea of a beach-front café. They were lucky enough to win the tender for the café space and opened with the Pool in January 2018.

Zoie is a Greek word, meaning life. Maricar and Scott chose the name for a number of reasons – it fits the energy and vibe of their beach-front location, one of their favourite holidays was to Santorini (one of the Greek islands), and they also named their daughter Zoe, who was born about 9 months after the holiday! The Zoie colours of pink, blue and yellow represent the magnificent sunsets over Scarborough Beach, which we are privileged to have on our doorstep.

Our Passion at Zoie

At Zoie, we’re passionate about creating great memories while tantalising the tastebuds – whether that’s through our signature coffee blend (Zoie #5), scrumptious savouries, award-winning Gelati, or decadent desserts. We believe that by creating great memories for our customers, our team and our community, we are playing our part in creating positive mindsets and attitudes; which ultimately results in people being better partners, parents, family members, leaders, team members, volunteers, or whatever roles they play in life.

Special Events at Zoie
Opening Party Shenanigans
Bustling with food and laughter
Special food setups ahoy!

Our Values

NEOTENY
This is our core value. The word NEOTENY comes from zoology and its literal meaning is the retention of juvenile features in the adult animal. The way we define NEOTENY is that it is about bringing all the best aspects of our 4-year-old selves into being – that is being joyful, playful, energetic, curious, creative, and approaching life with a sense of awe, wonder and possibility. Importantly, these traits are then combined with all the best aspects of having an adult perspective – being mature and thoughtful, efficient, organised, realistic and taking advantage of knowledge gained through learning and experience. Maricar’s spirit of NEOTENY was the reason Scott fell in love with her all those years ago, which is why this value is so important to us.

ACCOUNTABILITY
For us this means being responsible for our behaviour, learning from our mistakes, speaking up, taking action to make things better, showing initiative and owning and taking pride in our strengths.

TEAMWORK
We describe TEAMWORK as doing what’s best for the team, cooperating to achieve great results for our customers and our business, being flexible, and understanding different people have different styles of working and they contribute different ideas that are of benefit to the team.

GRATITUDE
At Zoie, we see this as being thankful, optimistic and generous. We’re lucky that we can look out to the beautiful Indian ocean to remind of this value, each and every day!

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