Tucked in the countryside of northwestern Lake County is a nondescript building that offers few hints, save for its creamy coffee color, as to the business carried on inside.
Once inside, though, the heady aroma of fresh roasted coffee wraps its perfume around visitors and hints at the success story brewing there.
Welcome to Coffee Masters, a coffee bean roasting plant in a small industrial park in Ingleside, where coffee entrepreneurs Jim and Jan Rich roasted more than 2 million pounds of beans last year for the 170 specialty coffees their firm produces.
”It`s the difference between store-bought and home-grown tomatoes,” Jim Rich, 43, said of the flavor one gets from brewing a cup of coffee with non-specialty coffee beans versus specialty beans.
Coffee Masters is the largest Midwestern roaster of specialty coffee beans, according to Jan, who added, ”The others roast for a retail outlet and do a little wholesale on the side.”
It`s a business she and Jim started seven years ago because they weren`t satisfied with the level of service or quality of coffee beans on which they had to depend as the owners of a West Dundee coffee retail shop.
”I took my last cent out of the bank and hoped to break even the first year,” Rich said.
That first year, Coffee Masters roasted 40,000 pounds in a rented warehouse in Wauconda. Today he and Jan import beans from 36 countries and sell to more than 9,600 accounts around the country from their 40,000-square- foot plant in Ingleside. In addition to coffee, Jim and Jan market tea, cocoa, coffee pots and mugs. Last year`s sales were $5.7 million; this year`s projection is $6.5 million.
”He`s not just selling beans,” said Joni Daminato, owner of Joni`s Cappuccino Beans `N More, a specialty coffee boutique in Schaumburg that sells 300 varieties of coffee. ”It`s also his knowledge and expertise. Out of all my vendors, Jim is the one who personally came to my store, looked at it and spent time with me before I opened my doors. I thought I knew everything about coffee, but he`s taught me a lot.”
Jim approaches the subject of coffee with the practical experience of a retailer, the passion of an aficionado and the enthusiasm of a teacher who wants the world to appreciate his subject as much as he does.
Along with Jan, 37, a former makeup artist and sales representative in the cosmetics industry, the couple work 15-hour days to not only build their business, which has grown 40 percent each year since it opened its doors in 1985, but also to educate people on the nuances and subleties of fine coffee. ”It`s so easy to sell (specialty) coffee,” said Jan, who launched the couple on their coffee odyssey 13 years ago when she managed the Coffee Bean, a Long Grove coffee boutique that she and Jim bought with a partner. ”This is a premium product people can enjoy without having to spend a lot of money.” A pound of Coffee Masters premium coffee averages about $7.50.
Yet Jan didn`t even drink coffee when the couple bought half interest in the Coffee Bean in 1979. Back then, people typically bought pre-ground coffee at the supermarket. Few thought of drinking flavored coffee.
”We had three flavors: chocolate, cinnamon and almond. It was a tiny shop, and we really packed (customers) in on Saturdays,” Jan recalled. ”Mall leasing agents visited us all the time because we were so unique, and they wanted us to come into their malls.”
While Jan managed the shop, Jim worked as an assistant band director at John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights. He quit teaching when they expanded the Coffee Bean to locations in Northbrook Court and Woodfield.
”We read and learned everything we could because we wanted to be the source for coffee,” said Jan.
The couple eventually sold out to their partner, and in 1983 they opened their own shop, That Coffee Place, at Spring Hill Mall in West Dundee. Over the next few years, they opened a second store in the mall, a kitchen shop called the Creative Cook, eventually combining the two into That Cook and Coffee Place.
The business did well, but the small retailer often travels a rocky road to maintain quality, Rich said. So when one of their biggest suppliers began selling coffee beans to their competition, Jim decided it was time to take control of their own destiny.
”We felt we deserved better than that,” he said. ”We decided to open our own roasting plant and commit ourselves to treating our customers the way we wanted to be treated as small specialty retailers.”
While Jan continued to manage the Spring Hill store, Jim got the roasting business up and running. In 1985, Jim went into the roasting business full time, while Jan continued at the shop. They sold the shop in 1989 so Jan could join the roasting business full time.
”Jim and Jan are really a team,” said Gary Talboy, founding director and past president of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a non-profit trade group. ”They`ve been together all along, side by side, punching it out and working extremely hard for a long time. They`ve invested dearly for the success they enjoy.”
The success of the Coffee Masters doesn`t really come as a surprise to Jan or Jim, partly because of the long hours they put into the company and partly because of the faith and commitment they have in each other and their business to make it the best it can be.
”It`s gratifying to know that if you work hard and put everything into it, you can be successful,” Jim said. ”But (the success of Coffee Masters)
is a surprise in terms of the fact that this isn`t what we started to do.”
Hardly. In fact, Jim grew up in show business as part of his family`s musical act. An only child, he made his debut when he was just 2 years old and joined the family act full time when he was 7.
”We were a show-business family, and Jim got his education through home correspondence,” said Lucille Rich, Jim`s mother, who lives in Mt. Prospect. ”He toured the whole country with us, and we even went to Africa for six months on a tour with the State Department.”
Jim tap-danced and played the drums. He was so good, his mother said, that he always had offers to leave the family act and go out on his own.
”But he wouldn`t leave us. He was a terrific entertainer and terrific drummer-and a very loyal son.”
The family performed on the Johnny Carson show and did numerous Bob Hope specials. They also appeared more than 20 times on the ”Bozo Show.” They continued to perform until Jim was 26.
”Dad was a phenomenal hoofer, but then he had an accident, and that put us out of business,” Jim recalled. ”We broke up the act.”
While performing with the family, Jim majored in education and percussion at Northwestern University. After college and when the act broke up, he began teaching full time as assistant band director at John Hersey High School. The 400-member band was a highly competitive group that appeared at the Rose Bowl and Orange Bowl.
”It was a seven-day-a-week job that started at 7 a.m. and continued into the night with meetings. The kids had just two weeks off in the summer, but I spent 10 and 12 hours a day writing half-time shows,” recalled Jim. ”It got to the point where I couldn`t keep up with the pace.”
He took a year`s leave of absence in 1981 to help out at the coffee store and never went back.
Although show business, teacher, band director and retailer may seem an unlikely combination from which to launch his fifth career in manufacturing, Jim said entertainment is a common thread that pulls them all together.
”They`re all public-oriented, and so much of retailing is selling yourself and smiling at the customer. In manufacturing you`re a little more removed (from the public), but you still entertain at trade shows,” Jim said. Like Jim, Jan looks back on her past jobs as a makeup artist and sales representative as a good training ground for the manufacturing business.
”Falling into coffee isn`t so strange because I have such extensive retail background,” said Jan, who spent the first seven years of her childhood on a Texas farm. ”I had really learned the business from the ground up and explored all parts of it, from working behind the counter to handling department store buyers.”
Her father, a pilot for American Airlines, moved the family to Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. She met Jim while still in high school, and after trying college for a year (”I wanted to make sure I wasn`t missing anything”), they married in 1973.
Jan attributes the success of both their business and their marriage to the fact that they can talk about anything, and their strengths complement each other.
”We discuss day-to-day problems on what`s best for the business, which is really what`s best for Jim and Jan because it`s all the same,” Jan said.
”It doesn`t matter who makes what happen; the fact is someone needs to make it happen. So we make it all happen together.”
The Riches` success in the specialty coffee business parallels the increasing sophistication of coffee drinkers who in the last eight years began looking for something better in their morning cups of java. According to Talboy, coffee consumption in the United States began declining after World War II when manufacturers introduced vacuum-packed cans and preground coffee and consumers no longer ground their own coffee.
”When they stopped putting coffee (beans) in front of a consumer, they could no longer evaluate the looks of it. That creates opportunities to compromise quality and improve cost efficiencies,” Talboy said.
What ultimately happened, Talboy added, is that the quality of coffee declined, and so did consumption. And it didn`t stabilize until eight years ago, when the specialty coffee industry started to realize an appreciable share of the market.
Talboy explained that specialty coffees are generally produced from arabica beans, which are difficult to grow and harvest. Many U.S. coffee drinkers are accustomed to coffees produced from robusta beans, a hardier strain developed by commercial roasters. ”Robusta costs less (than arabica), but it`s a terrible, terrible tasting coffee,” Jim said.
Coffee drinkers accustomed to the inferior taste of robusta beans may have difficulty recognizing premium coffee because they have been educated to a much lower level of expectation, Rich said. And that`s why he views himself as an educator as much as a businessman when it comes to separating the less attractive beans from the picture-perfect beans he roasts in his plant.
”There are probably 1,000 roasters calling themselves specialty roasters who come in without a quality product but want to seize the opportunity to sell something called `gourmet` because that`s where the market growth is,”
Jim said. ”It`s a big problem, and the consumer can be terribly misled because there is no truth in labeling (for the coffee industry).”
During the fledgling years of the specialty coffee industry, consumers had an easier time identifying premium coffee because it costs considerably more than the grocery store varieties, and whole-bean coffees were only found in small specialty retail shops.
That changed, however, when a glut of coffee on the international market two years ago caused prices to drop, enabling mainstream manufacturers to blend better coffees with their inferior coffees, Jim said.
”We don`t use the word `gourmet` like we used to because everyone throws it on their product,” Jan said. ”We even get calls from hardware stores and card stores who want to sell coffee.”
But the couple turns down that business. In order to maintain quality, they sell their beans only to retailers who dedicate themselves to selling a premium product and have enough turnover to ensure a stock that`s always fresh.
Said Jim, ”We`ve discouraged as many customers as we`ve encouraged. If a customer still has our coffee after six weeks, they shouldn`t be selling it.” To ensure freshness, Coffee Masters does not warehouse any coffee, Jim said, which means beans are roasted to order as quickly as possible and shipped to the retailer within 48 hours after roasting.
Said Terry Fewell, who now owns That Cook and Coffee Place in West Dundee and orders all his coffee beans from Coffee Masters, ”It`s the freshest and best coffee in Illinois. You can`t buy coffee better than that. I place my order on Monday, it`s roasted on Tuesday and Wednesday, I pick it up on Thursday, and it`s pretty well sold out within 10 days.”
Besides selling coffee beans to retailers, the couple spend considerable time educating business owners on how to store, sell and display their beans, which in turn, they believe, will help raise consumer awareness on what good coffee is all about.
”Opening up a coffee store doesn`t mean you have to buy a franchise; we train them from top to bottom,” Jan said.
As a retailer she displayed her coffees according to strength, which made it easy for customers to choose the right coffee.
Flavored coffees are also popular and represent about half their sales.
”Vanilla nut is our claim to fame, and we hold the original formula on that,” Jim said. Other best-selling flavors are hazelnut, chocolate raspberry, Irish creme and amaretto.
The coffee bean business firmly in place, the couple are turning their attention to new product development, including Cocoa Amore, an instant cocoa product that is mixed with water but, Jim said, ”tastes like whole milk has been added.”
Jan doesn`t see Coffee Masters as something separate from their personal lives because of the amount of time they devote to it.
”Our hobby is Coffee Masters,” she said. ”We don`t have a lot of other interests because there really isn`t a lot of time. In order for the business to stay ahead of the market and offer what our customers need, we just about have to work 24 hours a day. The business doesn`t run on its own, and our standards are too high to be absentee owners.”
But they do play a little. Jim still drums, and Jan plays piano. They golf a little and garden at their home in Hawthorn Hills.
The couple are devoted to animals, too. In fact, four stray cats have found a permanent home at Coffee Masters. ExecuCat and Ginger seldom leave Jim`s office and can be seen serenely snoozing on conference chairs. And Oreo and Kibbles live in the upstairs offices, comfortably draped on bookshelves or on the cat tree kept in a vacant office, where they sleep at night.
Despite the couple`s busy schedule, Jim`s mother, Lucille, said he remains a devoted and loyal son who calls every day, no matter where they are. ”We`re happy parents. We really lucked out with Jim and Jan,” she said.
The couple have no plans to take the company public, nor do they foresee a time in the near future when they will be able to spend fewer hours at the business, despite the fact that they`re adding staff and developing an upper management level.
”I love working for Jim and Jan,” said Diane Benton, who joined Coffee Masters almost four years ago as warehouse manager. ”They`ve been more than bosses. They`ve been friends, too. I went through a lot of (personal) problems when I first started, and they helped me through a lot of them. They were very supportive.”
Benton said when she came to work at Coffee Masters there were only eight employees, including Jim and Jan, and three of them worked with Benton in the warehouse.
”Today we have 21 (in the warehouse),” Benton said. ”I`m very surprised at the speed in which we grew, but I think we offer an excellent product. If the customer doesn`t like something, we work at it until we get what they want. We still have the personal touch with our customers.”
Debbie Parks started at Coffee Masters 18 months ago in the customer service department. Six months ago she was promoted to director of sales, without a clear idea of what her new job entailed.
”But Jim has worked really well with me,” she said. ”Jan does all the marketing ideas, and she`s great with that. They`re great people to work for. The company itself is growing so fast there are always changes.”
Said Jim: ”We have a strong middle-management team, and we`re giving more responsibility to our employees. But we`re putting in a lot of time because the business requires it.”
Children? Well, right now their baby is the roasting business, and children aren`t even in the picture.
”There`s so much we still want to do and develop,” Jim said. ”Maybe there will be some time to relax. But it`s hard to see when that might happen.”
