Once in a while, we turn our vintage Volkswagen camper into The Ground Squirrel Café, bringing coffee, community, friendship and inspiration wherever the road takes us.
Through stories, pop-ups and adventures, we create a space where like-minded brands can join the journey and connect with our curious, engaged community.
Bring your product along for the journey
Humbär is our self-built 1992 VW camper and the heart of The Ground Squirrel Café, a traveling space for stories, connection, and good things along the way. We take products out of the studio and into real moments: on the road, around the campfire, up a mountain, or into a quiet morning by the lake.
We build each story around where we are. Local food, beautiful places, and everyday rituals become the backdrop for products we genuinely enjoy and use. From morning coffee to evenings around the fire, your product becomes part of an experience rather than simply being placed in front of a camera.
At the heart of it all is the café ritual: making something good, sitting down, and sharing the moment. It gives us a natural way to introduce products to our community through stories that feel lived-in, useful, and worth remembering. We work with a small number of thoughtful brands we genuinely believe in and invite them to become part of the journey.
Partners
Every cup we pour starts as water from a tap we have never seen before. The Alb Filter sits in Humbär's water line between the hose and the tank, so a flat white on a mountain pass tastes the way it should and the filter got to show what it does at the most stunning places.
An afternoon of cooking over charcoal with Stiftung Brändi's Grillspiess: corn, peppers and mushrooms clamped into the skewer, turned over the grate in the low sun, and eaten off a checked cloth with rice, beans and flatbread. We brought this skewer all the way to Kruger National Park, South Africa, and took the pictures inside one of our most beloved camps, filmed the way the afternoon actually went, fitting naturally into our evening cooking session.
Badstugu is a sauna on wheels at the lake in Ål, halfway between Oslo and Bergen, in the Norwegian mountains. We filmed a session there the way we lived it. A place that needs no explaining once you have seen the light on that lake.
Our friend Julia wanted to know whether her offgrid cabin, deep in the countryside of Småland in Sweden, had it in her to become an Airbnb. So we asked, and the community answered louder than any of us expected: A quiet green wagon in a field turned out to be exactly the kind of place people are looking for.
Who is following our journey
@groundsquirrelcafelast 30 days
last 30 days
470'500 from 2'381
on a 44'000-view reel
views
from that one reel
last 30 days
last 30 days
Where they watch from
Instagram, last 30 days. Engagement = likes, comments, saves and reposts against accounts reached.
How it works
Tell us about the product or the place. Let's talk about the story you want to tell, your expectations, and the format in which you'd like to collaborate with us.
We pick the stop, the season and the light, and write the story around it. We hold ourselves to high standards, take the work seriously, and let you see it before it goes out into the world.
Depending on what we agree on, your product or place becomes part of our social media content, or you receive the content material to use yourself.
We're flexible in how we collaborate: your product or place can become part of our own content, or we can create UGC-style content specifically for you to use. We are a bilingual account, producing content in German and English.
Wherever we park, that’s the café.
The tour so far
01
Furka Pass
Above the clouds, next to the marmots
High up in the mountains on Furka Pass next to the marmots, The Ground Squirrel Café served a traditional Swiss Engadin walnut-caramel cake. Hairpin bends below, snow-covered peaks across the valley, and the last of the evening sun in everyone's cup.
On the counterEngadin walnut-caramel cake
02
By the sea
Turquoise water, warm filo dough
To the sound of the waves The Ground Squirrel Café welcomed guests with honey pistachio filo-dough layered Greek Baklava and heartfelt Spanakopita. Coffee was poured barefoot, with the sea a few steps from the counter.
On the counterBaklava & spanakopita
03
Between the fjords
Golden hour, straight from the forest
Between fjords and late summer roses, you could taste freshly baked bagels filled with cream cheese and freshly harvested chanterelles from the forest.
On the counterBagels with cream cheese & chanterelles
04
A fairytale forest
Reindeers were our first guests
In a magic fairytale forest, The Ground Squirrel Café opened its doors with a Jordgubbstårta, a traditional Swedish strawberry cake. Reindeers were our first guests!
On the counterJordgubbstårta
Bookings
If you'd like the café to open somewhere, we'd love to hear about it.
Collaborations
If you make something that fits our setting, or look after a place people ought to see, drop us a few lines about it and we'd be happy to get in touch. We'll tell you honestly whether we can make it look good, and where along the road it would fit.
or write to hello@thegroundsquirrel.cafe
