Todd Carmichael is the CEO and Co-Founder of La Colombe Coffee Roasters, one of the most innovative coffee companies that sparked a coffee revolution. Since opening his first La Colombe café in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia in 1994, Carmichael and his co-founder JP Iberti have expanded into 30 cafes across the country and hundreds of wholesale accounts nationwide. Not only is he one of Philadelphia Magazine’s “The 100 Most Influential People in Philadelphia,” he has also established himself as a world traveler and philanthropist.
Originally from a poor part of Washington, Carmichael decided that he wanted to pursue an education for himself and actually have a life that he wanted. While going to school at the University of Washington in Seattle, he met his Co-Founder and President JP Iberti. They both were working with coffee and they shared this belief that there was this energy coming from all of these small cafes. They decided to move to Philadelphia to start their own coffee company, La Colombe Coffee Roasters. The concept of goodwill is especially important to Carmichael as he has made it one of the main values that La Colombe stands by. La Colombe is committed to supporting coffee farms that are often overlooked. From being one of the biggest names in the coffee industry to traveling around the world to experience once-in-a-lifetime adventures, Todd Carmichael is one of the most interesting people that I have ever met. As the CEO and co-founder of the multi-million-dollar business La Colombe Coffee Roasters, Carmichael is not what you would expect from your average CEO.
Todd Carmichael was born on August 30, 1963 in Spokane, Washington. Growing up, he was surrounded by people who worked with their hands and worked for other people. At a young age, it was clear to him that this sort of profession was losing its dignity. As he got older, he knew that this wasn’t what he wanted for his future. He wanted to pursue education and get a degree that he could use to provide for his family and loved ones. Carmichael said, “There are often stories of rags to riches, but I think the understated part isn’t the glory of going to riches. It’s really the seed that’s planted in a young person when they realize that this is not what I want for myself and ultimately what I decided is that I wanted to leave the farms, I wanted to leave manual labor, and I wanted to pursue an education.”
He continued his education at the University of Washington where he studied business. While studying in Seattle, Carmichael started working in the warehouse of Starbucks, a startup at the time. During this time, he realized that coffee was his true calling in life. Carmichael then met JP Iberti, the Co-Founder and President of La Colombe Coffee Roasters. Iberti and Carmichael began talking about the idea of what is now La Colombe within the first couple of weeks of meeting. At the time, they were just kids who both loved working in the coffee industry. However, they could tell that that there was something exciting going on. At the same time, Carmichael described how he started to see coffee fit into his life, “In my mind, coffee and the business I was studying became connected or unified and simply, back then, I think this was 1986, I just never separated them.” After eight years of saving money, they moved to Philadelphia and started La Colombe in 1994.
It’s pretty much common knowledge that Seattle is the place for some of the best coffee in the world. The city itself is defined by its local roasters and cafes on every street corner. But coffee actually first became popular back in the 1700s, when tea was being taxed to the extreme. Over 200 years later, Seattle had all of the right qualities that came together at the right place and the right time for a new coffee scene to flourish. First, given the environment of the city, with regular overcast days in the mid-50s, it’s hard not to crave a hot coffee. This powered the opening of Café Encore in 1958, The Place Next Door in 1959, and El Matador in 1960. Then, in the 60s and 70s, everyone was all about counterculture. People looked for places where they could come together and talk about changing the world. This increased the demand for places like cafes and coffeehouses all over Seattle. Today, Seattle is still known for high-quality coffee. However, Carmichael and Iberti left the coffee city for new and better opportunities for their company in Philadelphia.
La Colombe Coffee Roasters is one of the country’s largest independent coffee roasters, serving and roasting signature blends and exceptional single origin coffees. Carmichael describes La Colombe as a coffee company with the mindset of a tech company, “La Colombe believes soundly that nothing is ever finished. Nothing. Not coffee, not the way of serving coffee, not the cups, not the environment, not the categories, and particularly not ourselves. Everything needs to evolve, particularly in food and beverage and acutely so in coffee. What that means is that we are always pushing the boundaries in terms of innovation as to where coffee can go.” A great example of that was first draft latte on tap, then draft latte in a can, or Carmichael’s patented coffee device, the Dragon, etc. The list goes on and on.
When Iberti and Carmichael first started La Colombe, their main mission for the company was and still is to educate people on what coffee should be. This mission statement derived from both of their obsessions with coffee. When I asked Carmichael about where he got the passion for coffee, he said, “I think we use the word ‘passion’ too easily. ‘Passion’ is a fiery, red-hot human emotion and typically it doesn’t have very much of a shelf life. Passion is like an epiphany, you know, it comes to you and it burns very hot and then it kind of tapers off. So, I don’t believe I have passion for coffee. What I do believe, because I see it in myself, is that you become something different than passion, something even stronger than passion. You become obsessed. It’s an obsession. It’s something that you’re compelled to do, something that you don’t really have a choice to do and over time, as you drive harder into that obsession, it seeps into your DNA and ultimately that drive, that innovation, that obsession becomes part of your DNA.” However, when he explains what he is passionate about, he reserves that for his wife, his four children adopted from Ethiopia, personal interests, and hobbies.
La Colombe Coffee Roasters doesn’t even compare to competing coffee companies like Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts. The coffee culture that everyone is used to, thanks to places like Starbucks, has only miseducated people on how coffee is traditionally served. What sets La Colombe apart from the rest is that the company aims to strip the coffee culture to its simplest parts to rebuild it without the element’s coffee drinkers have grown accustomed to. This simplicity remains as a principle effort in their coffee. In their cafes, baristas are trained to use only necessary ingredients: coffee, espresso, water, milk, sugar, and cocoa. That’s it. You won’t find any added flavor syrups, whipped cream on top, or any sort of blended beverages. Instead, La Colombe wants to showcase the raw, natural flavors of the beans from all over the world.
When Carmichael and Iberti initially started La Colombe in early May in 1994, they didn’t start wholesaling until that September. At the time, their whole vision for the company was to create one café with a roaster in it. This then maximized the amount of coffee that the one café would need, which would eventually end up having them opening their own warehouse. To do this, they wanted to make sure that they had a stable café. On September 1st, 1994, four months after opening their first café, Carmichael went to Iberti and said, “It’s time for us to start wholesaling.” Carmichael felt this way because every time he got to his café, there were always around 15-20 people waiting outside the door. After opening, they had a constant line for a few hours, very much like what you would see at a La Colombe café today. It was clear to him that the retail was engaged and healthy enough to focus more on the wholesale side of the company.
Today, with thousands and thousands of cafes that serve La Colombe coffee, along with 30 cafes across the country, it’s becoming easier to find La Colombe coffee. When Carmichael went to Hawaii with his family over the summer, he was in this small quaint café on a small island off of the mainland. He saw that this café was serving La Colombe coffee. He never really took the time to realize how big his company has gotten. He used this metaphor of how we, as a company, are climbing a mountain. Right now, we are almost halfway up this mountain, but not quite there yet. However, we sometimes forget to look down and see how far we’ve come. If we take the time to reflect how high we have gotten, it will only be easier to climb higher up this mountain. After visiting this café on a small island in Hawaii, he finally got to reflect how much growth La Colombe has experienced over the past few years.
In 2015, Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya purchased a share of La Colombe, becoming the majority investor. He helped the company raise $28.5 million to help fund plans for expansion after buying out the private equity firm Goode Partners to gain his stake. Carmichael describes his relationship with Ulukaya as both simple and complex, “We feel as though it’s the three of us, JP, Hamdi, and myself, are a brotherhood. JP and I started that brotherhood in the middle eighties, and when Hamdi came along, he displayed the same types interests and passions and obsessions that we do, and he became our sole investor and joined our brotherhood.” However, their relationship outside of that is professional. Because Hamdi is the singular investor, that requires board meetings, reporting, as well as a certain degree of respect. Therefore, they have this very important relationship that has a lot at stake between a key investor and CEO. In 2017, La Colombe planned to continue its expansion and open new cafes in cities with existing locations such as Washington DC, as well as in new cities, including Boston, Los Angeles, and La Jolla. The goal is for there to be approximately a hundred locations within the next three to four years. This wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the large investment from Ulukaya.
According to Carmichael, the first most important piece that went into the creation of the Draft Latte was to realize what was missing, “When you’re creating something new, that’s often the most difficult challenge. Improving something that already exists is one thing but actually seeing something that’s missing is another, and it’s hard to see black spaces or black voids.” Take a classic hot latte: it is described as concentrated coffee, milk and a third ingredient. It took Carmichael a while to understand that this third ingredient was missing. In the case of hot lattes, where billions of these are sold every year, this third ingredient is water vapor. The first thing he recognized was that there’s vapor missing in cold lattes. However, since the water vapor is hot, applying that to a cold environment would simply not work. The piece that he was missing that solved his problem actually came through from his son, “He was four years old, we were standing in front of the refrigerator together, he’s standing right in front of me, I’ve got my hand on his little shoulder and I take a whipped cream canister out of the refrigerator and I tell him to tilt his head back and I sprayed whipped cream into his mouth. I realized that whipped cream had that vapor. That was my missing vapor.” Within the next two weeks, Carmichael invented a brand-new system that created a true cold latte with concentrated coffee, milk, and vapor. They also got patents for this innovative technology within this same time period. Carmichael injected nitrous oxide through a valve at the bottom of the can to add that third ingredient. That became the draft latte.
The coffee industry is now in the middle of what Carmichael described as an “ice age”. Now, over half of everything that is served at La Colombe is cold. Before Carmichael created the Draft Latte, you couldn’t enjoy a high quality, cold coffee that was truly mobile, “The advent of the draft latte is creating an environment where we are saying we can take that authentic cold drink from brink and mortar cafes and go mobile with it.” Draft lattes have given us the ability to have a well-crafted, authentic, clean lattes in their backpacks, in their purses, in the cars, etc. This is shifting the way coffee is going in America today.
Ultimately with the Draft Latte, Carmichael created a texturized beverage that can be compared to other sorts of texturized beverages that are out there. For example, when you make a beverage using a blender, you’re injecting gas into it. Also, drinks where you have a martini shaker and by shaking it back and forth, you’re driving gas into it to create this bubbly, texturized, foamy beverage. As for right now, Carmichael is toying and playing with recipes for juices to possibly create smoothies, energy drinks, and even cocktails.
The concept of goodwill is especially important to Carmichael as he has made it one of the main values that La Colombe stands by. La Colombe has five principles of ethical trade in which the company is committed to withholding. The five principles include fairness, longevity, opportunity, water, and strictly Earth conscious. When deciding on what they want to pick next for their workshop coffees, an exclusive collection of coffee from origin countries, Carmichael and Iberti have a certain process they use in order to find high-quality coffee.
The first step in the process is finding what countries are in desperate need of help. “Countries where our money makes the biggest difference are prioritized, and this is really important. This is what has really driven me into countries where people thought I perhaps shouldn’t go at the time.” He focuses on countries where there are often people coming out of natural disasters, conflict, political strife, or catastrophes that are cut off from the farmers of the rest of the world. The second step, according to Todd, is looking at farming practices. “The best sort of coffees come from great farmers, so we like to look at areas with shade-grown coffees with certain types of varieties and certain types of altitudes.” Lastly, it all comes down to taste, he says. “To choose coffees in countries, you just taste, taste, taste. When you have a giant set of encyclopedias living in your head after tasting coffee for 40 years, you tend to say ‘Listen, let’s start looking in the Harar region because let’s look for something that’s a little more natural, a little more fruity’, (the Harar region being in Ethiopia), because we’re looking for that particular component, we know where to get it.” The process is that simple.
In 2013, Carmichael carried these principles into the creation of the Haiti Coffee Academy, an organization that supports coffee farmers in the southeast region of Haiti through education, training, materials, and market access. La Colombe as a whole is committed to supporting the Haitian coffee industry by buying a significant amount of Haitian coffee each year and bringing their beautiful beans to the U.S. This is only one example of Carmichael using his position to give back to society.
What made Carmichael want to start the Haiti Coffee Academy was the sense that something different really needed to be done, “This neighbor of ours, this American neighbor, Haiti, was one of the most significant coffee growing countries in the world. At one point, it grew half of the world’s coffee. It was a major player in the world of coffee. From its zenith, the country experienced revolutions, its experienced natural disasters that few of us can even imagine, political strife and embargos, poor governance and diseases. It brought it from its zenith to nearly zero coffee left growing in Haiti.” Since Haiti once grew at least the east coast’s coffee for so many years, Carmichael felt that someone needed to do something to help revive it. The only way to do that was to get on the ground and be a good neighbor.
So, they created the Haiti Coffee Academy that supports coffee farmers by helping them come back to abandoned farms and to bring those back. La Colombe plays the role of educator, good neighbor that can loan equipment as well as make microloans and loan platforms, and ultimately, the buyer. Carmichael said, “From the very first days I saw those barren mountains, most of it just abandoned, to what I see today, it’s worth every second of looking at that view. It proves a small company and a couple hard-headed guys can actually make a difference in the world.” His adventurous side comes out as he is always willing to go far and beyond the office to truly see how he can change the world for the better.
From walking across Antarctica to multiple near-death experiences, Carmichael has always been very adventurous since he was a kid. In 2008, he walked 690 miles to the South Pole, alone in subzero temperatures and whiteout weather where he suffered from frostbite and hallucinations, in thirty-nine days, seven hours and forty-nine minutes, breaking a world record. He also traveled the world working for a Saudi prince, spent months on a desolate South Sea island, tracked elephants in Namibia, and worked to save orangutans in Borneo. You would think that someone who has really traveled to the ends of the Earth, almost die, strike back everything the world throws at you, you would probably feel fulfilled. However, Carmichael will always feel the need to go back out and continue to explore.
In 2012, Carmichael combined his love of coffee with his love of adventure with his premiere of Dangerous Grounds, his very own reality/adventure series on the Travel Channel. The show focuses on traveling to the most remote and renowned coffee-producing regions of the world, sourcing for La Colombe.
Carmichael’s main goal for his TV show Dangerous Grounds was for people to see the world he was navigating. He wanted to shrink the distance between the coffee farm and the coffee cup in America. All the coffee that’s consumed in the United States of America is grown elsewhere (not including Hawaii) and it is so far away from people. Carmichael explained, “It’s grown on high top, isolated mountains in the most isolated countries. When the dirt road starts to wear out, that’s when you get out and you walk forward miles and eventually find a coffee farm. Psychologically, that distance is equally as far.” Also, most people don’t know that coffee is a fruit. They don’t know how it’s grown, picked, or who is working on the farms. Coffee is grown in countries all over the world with different languages, people, and religions. Being able to take a closer look at that and being able to share that was the ultimate goal for Dangerous Grounds.
Another goal for Dangerous Grounds was to show people what La Colombe is and how they did things differently from other coffee companies. Carmichael talks about how they do things more extreme, “The men on the top of the company, the two founders, are the ones that are driving the hardest out on the roads. I wanted people to see that here, it’s not like a traditional company where the executives just sit in a boardroom and make big decisions. We actually go out and meet our suppliers.”
Todd Carmichael continues to redefine what it means to be a successful CEO. As a man that pretty much does it all, he is probably the most captivating, motivating, and outspoken person currently in the food and beverage industry.
Twenty-five years after starting La Colombe, Carmichael hopes that the next twenty-five will go a little slower. He would like to continue growing the company at the kind of pace that it has today, “We are on a really great tear right now, with the draft lattes growing at about 150%, we’re in 70% of the stores in the United States of America. Now after 16 months after launch, I’d like to fill that up to 100%.” He also is looking into many different countries to hopefully open more cafes in Asia, specifically South Korea and Japan, Canada, Mexico, as well as in Europe and Australia. Carmichael said, “When I first set out, I wanted to create a brand for Philly. Then, I realized I wanted to do both Philadelphia and New York and DC. Then came Boston, Chicago and the rest of it until we became a national brand. I think that naturally, I just woke up and thought ‘Now that we’re a national brand, lets become an international brand.’”
When I asked Carmichael what his proudest moments and greatest accomplishments were, he said that it was difficult for him to point out one in particular when you’re talking about a company that started with two best friends, “When we opened up the door in Philadelphia that had no cafes, to a city that we had to explain what a latte was, what a cappuccino was, what a mocha was, and we had $200 left in our bank accounts, and we had no employees. But we had this sense that we were moving along the path of our destiny.” He then went on go say that Iberti and he aren’t the same people as when they first started the company. He believes that as you move forward with the business, everything becomes more complex and it requires something different from you. When talking about growing a small business, the person you are today, your company does not need in a week or two weeks. It needs a different version of you, it needs a smarter version of you.
La Colombe currently has 30 cafes, almost 1000 employees, a four-channel business (soon to be five), as well as coffees from twenty different countries and countless farms. This is quite different from what the company was at the beginning. So, after Carmichael talked about how much the company has changed, he revealed his greatest accomplishment, “It’s that ability to evolve every single day. It’s the secret to our success. Once you add that to an obsession, to push the boundaries, you end up getting great things. So ultimately, it’s that. Our greatest accomplishment is our willingness to evolve.”
TODD CARMICHAEL 