Freedom Coffee Inc — the company behind a red "FRDM" wordmark linked to Eoghan McCabe's San Francisco Freedom Club — has filed an SF business registration. The paperwork lists a Jackson Street address, not the Polk Street storefront its own hiring page points to.

A coffee company built around a red, star-spangled wordmark and a lot of talk about "freedom" has taken its first concrete civic step in San Francisco. The step, it turns out, points in a slightly different direction than the company's own marketing.

City business records show a fresh registration for "Frdm Coffee," owned by Freedom Coffee Inc, filed on Aug. 17, 2026 (DataSF's registered-business dataset (external source, opens in a new tab)). That is a real, checkable trace — usually a sign a build-out is coming. But the address the City has on file is 1591 Jackson St., Unit 185, on the Nob Hill edge of Polk Gulch. It is not the storefront the brand has been pointing customers and job-seekers toward.

That storefront sits a few blocks west. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that city permits and a Freedom Coffee hiring page indicate a café planned for 1850 Polk St., a retail space the paper said last housed a Pilates studio. So the same venture now carries two addresses: the Jackson Street one on the City registration, and the Polk Street one in its own recruiting materials. Which becomes the room where you actually buy a coffee is, for now, unsettled.

Worth heading off confusion: this is not Le Mil's Coffee, the South Indian filter-coffee roaster that registered for its own Polk Street café in late July. Two unrelated coffee bets, one corridor.

Who's behind it

The brand keeps itself deliberately vague. Per the Chronicle, Freedom Coffee's website shows little more than a white "FRDM" mark on red, pitched in its metadata as unapologetically American and brewed stateside. California corporate records the paper reviewed name Katie Tolstedt as the company's CEO, CFO and secretary.

Tolstedt's second job is what elevates a coffee filing into something newsier. She handles operations for the San Francisco Freedom Club (external source, opens in a new tab), the invite-driven social club started by tech founder Eoghan McCabe. The club casts itself as a party machine for people devoted to freedom, America, capitalism and merit; when McCabe introduced it on X in 2024, he framed it as a celebration of American values and insisted it wasn't a partisan project. Its last event, the Chronicle noted, seems to date to March 2025.

McCabe co-founded and chairs Fin, the AI customer-service firm once known as Intercom — a company the Chronicle reported Salesforce agreed in June to buy for about $3.6 billion, with the deal slated to close in late 2027. But no filing ties him to the coffee company as an owner. The link is one of shared people and a shared "FRDM" vocabulary, not documented control.

What isn't nailed down

For a beat that runs on specifics, this one is short on the numbers that decide whether a room lasts. No seat count. No price point. No menu, and no opening date in any public record. No liquor license on file — not that a coffee bar needs one. And the Polk Street premise itself leans on the Chronicle's read of permits and a jobs page, not on a City registration naming that address; the registration the City actually holds names Jackson Street.

Here is what stands: an entity called Freedom Coffee Inc has a live San Francisco business registration, it moves in the orbit of a well-funded club with an openly ideological brand, and it is circling a Polk corridor that has absorbed a string of new coffee bets this year. Whether "Frdm Coffee" becomes a working café or stays a wordmark and a hiring page is what the next filing will tell us. Until a permit, a lease or a health inspection pins this company to a specific room on a specific date, it remains what it is today: a registration, a red logo, and a lot of freedom.