La Colombe Coffee Roasters

La Colombe Coffee Roasters was founded in 1994 by Todd Carmichael and Jean Philippe Iberti in Philadelphia, where the company remains headquartered. Carmichael, an adventurer who completed a solo unsupported trek to the South Pole, became the public face of a brand defined as much by direct origin travel as by what ends up in the cup. That combination of audacity and sourcing rigor gave La Colombe an early identity that distinguished it from the broader American specialty wave of the same era.

The company opened its first cafe in Center City Philadelphia and expanded over the following two decades into New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., Boston, and Los Angeles, among other markets. Before retail expansion, La Colombe built its reputation through the restaurant and hospitality trade—its espresso became a fixture in high-end hotel dining rooms up and down the East Coast. In the mid-2010s, the company introduced the Draft Latte, a nitrogen-infused canned latte that became one of the more commercially successful ready-to-drink coffee products in the U.S. market and pushed the brand into grocery distribution at national scale.

La Colombe roasts in Philadelphia and sources across established specialty origins including Ethiopia, Colombia, and Brazil. The portfolio balances accessible espresso blends—consistent enough for high-volume cafe use—with single-origin filter offerings. Roast profiles tend toward medium, favoring clarity and approachability over the darker styles that defined American specialty coffee before the third-wave shift.