Kristi Ross, Tastytrade co-founder and serial entrepreneur, thinks the coffee industry is ripe for innovation.
She and her husband Craig launched U3 Coffee this week aiming to introduce the first "coffee ecosystem" that will connect farmers, entrepreneurs and consumers through the combination of a content platform, online marketplace and charitable arm.
Self-funded by the Rosses, the company will open U3 Coffee Roasters in Chicago suburb Forest Park next spring.
"We felt like we really needed to dive into being a roaster ourselves and running a café ourselves so that we could better serve this industry and understand it at a much deeper level," Krisit Ross said.
The new company is essentially bringing Tastytrade, a financial media company, to the coffee industry by providing a media platform and coffee ecosystem where Ross hopes to share the stories behind each cup.
At Tastytrade, Ross helped not only develop a financial network media arm, but other components like an online trading platform and a futures exchange, ultimately building seven companies within the company umbrella in the last decade. She wants to bring the same model to her coffee ecosystem.
"I'm taking what I learned from the financial services industry and applying that to a mass market product industry versus this niche industry that I came from," she said.
Ross sold Tastytrade in 2021, marking a "unicorn" exit for the company, and has since gone on to become a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. Now she wants to jump off and start something new with U3 Coffee.
"My husband and I wanted to do something together for the second half of our lives. We got on too many planes flying in opposite directions and we needed to find something that we both love, and coffee is that," she said. "We believe in an industrial community built around intentional connections, and coffee is a catalyst for those meaningful connections."
Along with the media platform, U3 will offer a marketplace to showcase products along with their stories. The company also launched the U3 Charity Bank, which was ultimately designed as a way to tip farmers. While coffee shops now offer the option to tip your barista, Ross thinks it should extend to the entire ecosystem.
"We will give rise to the 2,200 grocers in the U.S. but also the farmers and other coffee entrepreneurs along the value chain," Ross said.
While she had initial concerns that the $85 billion-plus coffee industry in the U.S. — projected to get to $102 billion by 2025 — was oversaturated, she still thinks a lot of people take for granted how their coffee actually gets into their cup every day.
U3 Coffee will eventually provide traceability and trackability through blockchain for coffee drinkers about where their coffee is coming from.
"Once you start to unpack it, you see that there are still areas of inefficiencies and areas for innovation. We want to unite the world through coffee from the farmer, to the coffee entrepreneur to the end customer," Ross said.
