Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/131835
T he town of Invermere isn't exactly a specialty-coffee powerhouse. Though its location in eastern British Columbia between the Canadian Rockies and the Purcell Mountains provides plenty of picturesque backdrops, the outpost—with a population of 3,000 that swells to about 10,000 when tourists descend in the summer—boasts only a handful of coffee shops. But one of those is a behemoth. The flagship café for Kicking Horse Coffee serves as home base for the well-established roaster that distributes throughout Canada and much of the Western United States. The unique, high-ceilinged shop is part of the 60,000-square-foot roasting facility Kicking Horse launched in 2003. A retail store wasn't always the plan, but public demand spurred its 2008 opening. "With so many people knocking at our door wanting to have a tour, we decided we had to do a café," says Elana Rosenfeld, Kicking Horse's CEO. Rosenfeld and her partner Leo Johnson started Kicking Horse in 1996, choosing a name inspired by Invermere's surroundings. "I was sitting around the coffee table with friends talking about names, and one of them threw out 'Kicking Horse,'" she says, "which is the name of a pass and a river just north of us." Working on a five-kilo roaster out of Rosenfeld's garage, Kicking Horse started out targeting B.C.'s Columbia Valley, and Rosenfeld soon nudged the company toward quality and sustainability. "We immediately discovered that there was 62 COFFEE ALMANAC • June 2013 a huge gap in the grocery store aisles," Rosenfeld says. "There was no whole-bean coffee, no organic coffee—there was no specialty coffee." Rosenfeld says her interest in organic produce led her to incorporate that ideal into the company. "I wasn't going to put herbicides and pesticides in my garden, so why would I buy coffee for my business that wasn't organic?" she says. As Kicking Horse began moving more into the specifics of its supply chain, Rosenfeld also became interested in the fair-trade movement, and when TransFair Canada (now known as Fairtrade Canada) launched in 1997, Kicking Horse became the first licensed roaster in Western Canada. "When we started, a lot of our brokers didn't know what fair trade or organic were," Rosenfeld says. "We had to introduce them to the idea. But I'm happy that huge brands like Starbucks and Kraft now are getting into organic and fair trade because it just contributes to the whole movement." Kicking Horse's growth has largely been through grocery-store sales throughout Canada, and last year the roaster made the jump to the United States—first through online retailer Amazon, and then to grocery chains like Fred Meyer. "The grocery store business in the U.S. is certainly challenging," Rosenfeld says. "There are a lot more competitors in the marketplace than in Canada." Though its coffee is now available in many markets, Kicking Horse's roots are still in Invermere—and in the company's retail