Lekko Coffee Finds Room to Grow in New Cleveland Roastery

The new Sivetz machine inside the Lekko Coffee roastery in Cleveland. All images courtesy of Lekko Coffee Roasters.

The get-up-and-go at Ohio’s Lekko Coffee Roasters is at an all-time high with the opening of a huge new roastery in downtown Cleveland.

Roasting officially launched in May inside the 5,500-square-foot warehouse space in the Twist Drill Building, where original hardwood floors and large windows accentuate the industrial feel.

A new gas-powered Sivetz SRM-15 fluid-bed roaster anchors the 3,700 square feet dedicated to production, supplying roasted specialty coffee for the five-year-old company’s two cafes, online sales and wholesale business.

The remaining square footage is divided among green coffee storage, offices and a cupping room Lekko calls The Lab. The space was most recently used as a photography studio for food brands, leaving a cyclorama wall ready for Lekko’s own product photography and videography.

“This move was necessary to continue growing,” Lekko Coffee Co-Founder Matt Ashton told Daily Coffee News. “We were not able to grow into more shops or wholesale without this move.”

Matt and Laura Ashton launched Lekko Coffee with a cafe in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood in 2021, roasting in-house on an Arc 800 roaster and producing larger batches on a Mill City Roasters MCR-6 in a separate facility in Old Brooklyn.

On New Year’s Day 2025, Lekko’s 600-square-foot, 10-seat second cafe opened in the Warehouse District, in a space previously occupied by Phoenix Coffee. The shop is about a block from the 36-story Sherwin-Williams global headquarters, which was completed earlier this year and is expected to bring thousands of employees downtown on business days.

In April 2025, the Ashtons and business partners opened the sibling business Little Cloud Sandwiches in Ohio City, about two blocks from the original cafe. In addition to serving sandwiches, fries and other items, the Little Cloud kitchen prepares foods and syrups for the cafes.

With the larger roasting facility increasing both capacity and visibility, Lekko’s next steps are to ramp up production and sales while developing its onsite coffee lab and expanding through wholesale, grocery and direct-to-consumer channels. Ashton said the company is also open to opportunities for additional cafes.

“Now with ample space, utilities, room for storage and a place for a lab and an office, we can tackle projects and a level of business that was never attainable in our old spaces,” Ashton said. 

Comments? Questions? News to share? Contact DCN’s editors here. For all the latest coffee industry news, subscribe to the DCN newsletter.