The new Intelligentsia Coffee production headquarters in Bedford Park, Illinois. All images courtesy of Intelligentsia Coffee.
Chicago-based specialty coffee trailblazer Intelligentsia Coffee recently laid the groundwork for a new era of growth inside an enormous new 45,000-square-foot roastery.
Fully operational since late last year, the company’s new “Roasting Works” spreads out over a 3.7-acre parcel of land in Bedford Park southwest of Chicago, with about four times more interior space than the company’s previous roastery on Fulton Street on the Near West Side.
“This new facility allowed us to consolidate operations under one roof. Previously we had multiple warehouses where our teams operated,” Intelligentsia Director of Coffee and Operations Sam Sabori told Daily Coffee News. “The new facility has given all our teams more room, from quality control to green storage to roasting to production to shipping. We have 20 times more green storage capacity, for example, than our old facility.”
A refurbished 300-kilo-capacity Probat R1500R roaster is the behemoth at the center of the climate-controlled production area, which even has heated floors in the winter. The facility is kept under positive pressure to reduce dust and has a state-of-the-art dust collection system, as well as advanced safety systems and five loading docks.
Alongside the Probat, a pair of 90- and 23-kilo Gothot roasters offer additional batch size flexibility, while green coffees for all the machines are procured by Intelligentsia Director of Sourcing and Sustainability Monica Terveer.
Said Sabori, “These machines give us the ability to run microlots in batches as small as 25 pounds, while also roasting batches as large as 550 pounds for some of our best-selling blends.”
Founded in Chicago in 1995 by Doug Zell and Emily Mange, Intelligentsia Coffee grew throughout the 2000s and 2010s as a leading figure in specialty coffee’s “Third Wave” movement, helping to popularize concepts such as single-origin, traceable coffees and direct trade with coffee producers.
In 2015 the company was acquired by Peet’s Coffee, three years after Peet’s was purchased by German billionaire family-owned JAB Holding Company. By that time Intelligentsia was operating upscale cafes in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, with roasting facilities in each region.
Today Intelly’s total of 14 cafes includes shops in Austin, Boston and Seoul, South Korea, with its fourth Seoul location slated to open later this year. Roasting for all cafes, wholesale customers and online sales now occurs in Chicago.
Sabori said that Intelligentsia currently has several new coffee bars in the works that may be announced in the coming weeks or month, while the company plans to soon introduce public tours at the roastery, where a training lab for existing wholesale clients is already open.
From there, Sabori said the company will continue “what we have always strived for — weekly releases of fresh and expressive coffees, striving to instill in all of our customers that coffee is culinary.”
Comments? Questions? News to share? Contact DCN’s editors here. For all the latest coffee industry news, subscribe to the DCN newsletter.
Related Posts
Howard Bryman
Howard Bryman is the associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is based in Portland, Oregon.
Comment