La Colombe Coffee Roasters: how two baristas pioneered third-wave coffee in the US

Executive overview

Two part-time baristas — one from rural Washington State, one from the south of France — met at a Seattle grunge show, cooked dinners together for three years, and eventually co-founded La Colombe Coffee Roasters in Philadelphia.

Their thesis: American restaurants were serving world-class food with terrible coffee. By sourcing beans directly from farms and selling to chefs rather than consumers, they built the wholesale foundation of a billion-dollar brand.

The key structural shift came later when they rejected a private equity board pushing 200-cafe rollout, bought them out with Hamdi Ulukaya's help, and bet on canned cold brew instead.

The real competitive advantage was treating coffee as a culinary ingredient — and selling directly to chefs who already understood that.

Origins: two baristas, one shared stove

• Todd Carmichael grew up food-insecure in rural Eastern Washington; got a full athletic scholarship to University of Washington and worked at Starbucks' warehouse to pay for it
• JP Iberti grew up in Nice, France; came to Seattle for flight school and became a barista at Torrefazione Italia — then the best coffee roaster in the US
• They met in 1987 at a Green River show; JP asked to use Todd's gas stove; cooked dinners there every week for three years
• Coffee sourcing became their shared obsession: why not go directly to the farm, like JP's father did with produce?
• Todd spent three years in Europe (largely the south of France) saving $95,000 and writing a business plan by hand

Why Philadelphia, not Seattle

• Seattle was the obvious choice in 1993, but it was already competitive and expensive
• Philadelphia had beautiful architecture, walkable streets, cheap warehouse space, and almost no specialty coffee
• The strategic anchor: Le Bec-Fin, voted the number one restaurant in the country, was based there
• Proximity to New York gave access to the broader fine-dining scene

Building the first location

• Found two narrow adjacent storefronts on Rittenhouse Square; knocked the wall out
• Traveled through Italy buying equipment: espresso machines, hand-painted ceramic grinders and cups, a roaster strapped to a pallet
• Discovered they couldn't roast inside — no ventilation; Todd jackhammered into the building's 20-story garbage chute to create a chimney
• Roasted in the middle of the night to avoid fire department complaints; no permits, asked forgiveness rather than permission
• Built their first blends by hand-roasting hundreds of samples in a half-pound drum roaster, grinding and tasting in JP's apartment

Getting the first customers

• October 15, 1994: walked uninvited into the kitchen of Le Bec-Fin and made coffee for chef Georges Perrier
• The chef threw out his old grinder on the spot and said: "Go get your shit"
• Same day: repeated the approach at the Four Seasons with chef Jean-Marie Lacroix; same result
• By end of that week, calls were coming in from top New York restaurants
• Chefs didn't buy from ads — they talked to each other; word spread entirely through kitchen networks

Pricing and positioning

• Wholesale coffee in Philadelphia at the time: ~$1.50/lb; La Colombe priced in the mid-sevens
• The pitch to chefs: "Coffee is a spice" — a pinch of saffron costs more but changes the dish entirely
• No resistance from high-end restaurants; the quality gap between food and coffee was too obvious
• Described blends in exactly three words each; designed for the American palate to be soft, sweet, and balanced rather than bitter

Direct sourcing from farms

• Started buying from brokers, then shifted to direct relationships as specialty demand increased
• First farm visit: a Swiss-owned plantation in Brazil, met through a customer at the Rittenhouse cafe
• The real challenge was logistics: building supply chains from farms in Rwanda, Haiti, or El Salvador to Philadelphia
• In places like Haiti and El Salvador, middlemen extracted most of the value; farmers got pennies
• Built trust by returning repeatedly — locals eventually called Todd "le blanc," the white guy who always comes back
• Focused on small, premium lots that large traders ignored; avoided disrupting commodity volumes

Todd's breakdown and JP's response

• Around 2000, six years in, Todd's mental health deteriorated: 24/7 anxiety, couldn't sleep or eat, feared repeating his father's fate
• Offered JP his shares and said he was done
• JP refused: "Don't make any decision now. Go get better and come back."
• Todd went to a remote South Pacific island with a backpack and a surfboard; built a hut, fished, surfed, and wrote a book
• Returned three months later in a different place; JP had run the business without significant disruption
• Staff turnover at La Colombe was historically very low — a tight core team made the absence manageable

Expanding to cafes and the private equity mistake

• Stayed at two Philadelphia locations until 2007; fear of proving the first one was a fluke delayed expansion
• Opened a New York cafe in 2007–2008; revenue went hockey-stick immediately
• Brought in a private equity investor to fund both cafe growth and a new idea: canned cold brew
• The arrangement lasted 52 days to the first board meeting; the PE firm wanted 200 cafes, not cold brew
• Todd and JP walked out: "We're buying you out"
• Cost them double the original investment to exit — but they credit it with forcing operational maturity

The Hamdi Ulukaya rescue and the draft latte

• Needed an angel investor who understood craft: someone who "makes things" and cares about ingredients
• Todd had met Hamdi Ulukaya (Chobani) months earlier through shared concern about Syrian refugees
• Pitched him in New York with a prototype can: drilled a hole, fitted a volleyball valve, pressurized with nitrous oxide to create self-foaming cold brew latte
• Ulukaya invested; bought out the PE firm; the canned draft latte became the product distributed in two out of three US grocery stores
• La Colombe's total valuation reached approximately $1 billion; Chobani later acquired the company outright

On luck and partnership

• JP: luck and hard work roughly 50-50; timing, the people you meet, and the opportunities they create all count as luck
• Todd: "The grout is luck — it's what holds all the broken pieces together"; estimates 35%
• Both agree: without the chance meeting at that Green River show, there would be no La Colombe