In 1982, Durango Coffee Co. owner Carl Rand was just a seasonal chef working at Tamaron.
Barely scraping by, Rand came up with the idea to start roasting coffee and selling to local restaurants. By May 1, 1984, Rand began wholesaling coffee beans out of his home in Hermosa. His first customer was Maria’s Bookshop.
The coffee company now sits at 40 years old with a storefront location on Main Avenue and a roastery at the Durango Tech Center.
“It just sounded interesting to me,” Rand said. “And I researched that for a couple of years. Actually, this was only a couple of years after Starbucks started in the ’80s.”
Rand said this was before the luxury coffee industry took off and there were few roasters, if any at all in Durango. He was familiar with the local restaurant industry, having been a chef in Durango for the previous five years.
“I was familiar with restaurants and the type of service they needed,” he said. “And it was easy for me to go in and talk to them and try to get their business.”
After three years, he moved the business into town in the back of the Upper Crust Bakery where Carver Brewing Co. is now. He also served as pastry chef there.
A few years after that he moved across the street and stayed there until purchasing the 730 Main Ave. location where the business became a full fledged coffee shop and gourmet kitchen shop.
He ran the shop for 12 years and then sold the retail business in 2004 to Tim Wheeler, who ran it for another 10 years. In 1990, Rand split the business up into a retail and wholesale entity, moving manufacturing out to the Durango Tech Center.
In 2014, Wheeler sold the business to people who decided it wasn’t for them, Rand said.
Katherine Walker picked up the pieces, remodeled and reopened the present shop on Main Avenue. For Rand, it’s been an incredible accomplishment for the business to last 40 years.
“It’s great. I wouldn’t want to be starting a business now. That’s for sure,” he said. “It’s expensive and too many hoops you have to jump through now.”
He says that coffee has been a “fun product” to work with, noting that he’s been able to travel and work with different farmers on a yearly basis.
Rand has been buying beans direct from farms in Colombian, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Brazil for 34 years. He said he purchases high quality, sustainable coffees directly from farms throughout Central and South America.
He said he originally got the idea to start roasting beans from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. Before moving to Durango, Rand served as a private chef at a club on Martha’s Vineyard, and one of the managers had called him after he moved to Durango, asking him if we was interested in wholesaling pastries with the coffee company.
He said Green Mountain went in a different direction, but it planted the idea to sell coffee.
It hasn’t always been easy to adapt to Durango’s growing market. Competition in Durango’s coffee industry is high. There are close to 30 different coffee shops in Durango with three coffee wholesalers.
But more than just competition, much of Durango Coffee Co.’s dilemmas have come because it has outlived many of the accounts it has sold to.
“We’ve had to go out and try to get new customers,” Rand said. “We’ve been pretty successful at that. It’s a small market.”
The business still operates as a wholesaler within the Four Corners. Rand continues to search the globe for interesting and exotic coffees.
“We would not be able to sustain our high quality without supporting our farmers with sustainable prices for their hard work,” he said.
tbrown@durangoherald.com
