specialty-coffee
(12)
Peet's Coffee
The Berkeley roaster taught America to expect more from a cup. Sixty years later, its harder trick is carrying that craft from a hand-roasted batch to grocery aisles, subscriptions and airplane trays without turning it into mere nostalgia.
Dutch Bros Coffee
The Oregon drive-thru that turned a pushcart, a windmill logo and a blue energy drink into a $1.6 billion coffee company - one Rebel at a time.
BrewBird
BrewBird is a San Carlos, California hardware and coffee company that reinvents office coffee. Its countertop machine brews specialty, whole-bean, pour-over-quality coffee in about 60 seconds using fully compostable pods filled with beans from local roasters like Sightglass, Verve and Equator. Each pod carries a QR code that tells the machine the exact water temperature and brew time for the beans inside. Founded in 2019 by CEO Mickey Du, BrewBird sells to offices and hospitality spaces - customers include Meta, LinkedIn and Salesforce - and has raised a $32M Series A led by investors including Sequoia Capital.
Rarebird, Inc.
Rarebird is a New York and San Leandro-based specialty coffee company that replaces caffeine with paraxanthine (Px), the natural metabolite your body turns caffeine into. Founded by bioengineer Dr. Jeffrey Dietrich, Rarebird uses a patented reverse-infusion process to load 60mg of Px into single-origin Colombian decaf beans, promising alertness and focus without the jitters, anxiety, cortisol spikes, or wrecked sleep. Backed by Y Combinator, AgFunder, First Round Capital and the National Science Foundation, Rarebird is trying to make Px 'the third coffee' - a category alongside regular and decaf.
Jeffrey Dietrich
Jeffrey Dietrich is a bioengineer-turned-coffee-founder who built Rarebird around paraxanthine, the molecule your body actually makes when it metabolizes caffeine. After a PhD at UC Berkeley in Jay Keasling's lab and nearly a decade co-founding and running R&D at the industrial biotech company Lygos, Dietrich turned his own dwindling caffeine tolerance into a company. Rarebird sells decaffeinated specialty coffee infused with lab-grade paraxanthine, promising the lift of coffee without the jitters, crash, or ruined sleep. Backed by Y Combinator, AgFunder, and two NSF grants, the company holds U.S. patents on the process and won the Specialty Coffee Association's Best New Product award.
Copper Cow Coffee
Copper Cow Coffee is a California-based specialty coffee company reimagining traditional Vietnamese coffee for the American market. Founded by Vietnamese-American entrepreneur Debbie Wei Mullin, it sells single-serve pour-over pouches, flavored ground coffees, and latte kits paired with sweetened condensed milk creamers, all made with real ingredients and beans sourced from organic, sustainable Vietnamese farms where growers are paid roughly double the market rate. The women- and AAPI-owned brand has grown from a garage operation into a product sold in thousands of retail stores nationwide.
Debbie Wei Mullin
Debbie Wei Mullin is the founder and CEO of Copper Cow Coffee, a Los Angeles based Vietnamese coffee company she launched in 2016 out of her sister's garage. A UC Berkeley economist and MIT-trained urban planner who once managed supply chains at the World Bank, she turned her mother's Vietnamese heritage into a single-serve pour-over inspired by the traditional phin filter. The company has sold more than 20 million coffees, reached over 3,000 retail doors including Target, Whole Foods and Costco, and pays its Vietnamese farmers roughly twice the market rate. She pitched on Shark Tank Season 12 in 2021.
Blue Bottle Coffee
Blue Bottle Coffee is an Oakland-born specialty roaster and cafe chain that helped define the third-wave coffee movement. Founded in 2002 by clarinetist James Freeman, it built a reputation on freshly roasted single-origin beans, an obsessive 48-hour freshness rule, and a spare, Japanese-influenced cafe aesthetic. It now runs roughly 140 cafes across the US and Asia plus a sizable e-commerce and subscription business, and changed hands in 2026 when Centurium Capital agreed to buy its retail operations from Nestle.
Karl Strovink
Karl Strovink is the CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee, the Oakland-born specialty roaster now owned by Nestlé. A Berkeley native with an MBA from MIT Sloan, he arrived in 2019 from a twelve-year run at Converse and has spent his tenure pushing Blue Bottle toward oat milk by default, instant espresso, zero-waste cafés, and aggressive expansion across Asia, all while protecting the brand's small-batch identity inside a thirty-billion-dollar coffee parent.
Fellow
Fellow makes design-led gear for people who take their home coffee seriously - the gooseneck Stagg EKG kettle, the Ode and Opus grinders, vacuum-insulated travel mugs, and a roaster-rotating subscription called Fellow Drops. Founded by Jake Miller in 2013 after a Stanford d.school project, it bootstrapped its way from Kickstarter to a $30M Series B in 2022.
Jake Miller
Jake Miller is the founder of Fellow, a San Francisco-based premium coffee gear company known for design-forward products like the Stagg EKG electric kettle, Ode Brew Grinder, and Carter Move Mug. He launched Fellow as a Stanford MBA class project in 2013, weathered 73 investor rejections and a failed first product, before building a nine-figure consumer brand sold in 45+ countries and backed by $42M in funding. Miller's mission is to transform everyday coffee routines into meaningful rituals by bridging the gap between specialty roasters and home baristas.
James Hoffmann
James Hoffmann is an English barista, YouTuber, author, and co-founder of Square Mile Coffee Roasters. He won the 2007 World Barista Championship in Tokyo and went on to become the most-watched coffee voice on the internet, with a YouTube channel exceeding 2.5 million subscribers. Known for tortoiseshell glasses, knit sweaters and a dry sense of humour, he turned brewing minutiae into mainstream curiosity.