86 / 96
The first Kaldi’s location was
started in the DeMun neigh-
borhood, which straddles the
city of limits of St. Louis and
Clayton, Missouri. The busi-
ness was founded by friends
Howard Lerner and Suzanne
Langlois, whose original goal
was to create a fun place to go
have coffee, in a city where cof-
fee options were limited – there
wasn’t even a Starbucks in the
airport at the time. Soon after
achieving that goal, they started
roasting their own coffee, which
they began selling to other local
businesses.
For a little over a decade, Kaldi’s
remained a popular local busi-
ness with just the one retail lo-
cation. Then, in 2005, Tricia Zim-
mer Ferguson took an interest.
Originally, Tricia and her family
– including her brother Tyler
Zimmer and her soon-to-be
husband Josh Ferguson – were
interested in opening a fast
casual concept and were look-
ing for a coffee program. They
fell in love with the ambience
at Kaldi’s, however, and their
plans changed. They saw an op-
portunity to take a niche brand
and turn it into a national lead-
er, and they convinced Howard
and Suzanne to sell them the
retail portion of the business,
and two years later, the rest of
it.
“Since then, we’ve really grown
really quickly,” says Brett Israel-
son, Operations Manager.
Immediately following 2007, the
“Immediately follow-
ing 2007, the com-
pany aggressively
expanded both their
retail and wholesale
operations.”
JULY/AUGUST 2019