La Colombe Coffee Roasters: Todd Carmichael and J.P. Iberti. A Brotherhood Built on Coffee (2020)

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.7 • 31.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2026

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Todd Carmichael and J.P. Iberti met at a grunge concert in Seattle in the 1980s, they were an unlikely pair. But they shared a love for great coffee, and the two friends began to dream about opening a cafe and premium roastery that would produce coffee at a higher quality than anything in the U.S. at the time. A few years later, Todd and J.P. co-founded La Colombe in Philadelphia, and went on to play a leading role in the third wave of specialty coffee in the U.S. Today, their coffee drinks are sold in stores across the country, and in 2023, La Colombe was acquired by Chobani for $900M.

TIMESTAMPS:

0:11:22 - Learning barista basics: like being a DJ
0:25:25 - Todd squats at JP’s place, they set out to sell coffee
0:29:48 - How La Colombe gets its name
0:32:40 - Launching the business in a city they've never visited
0:35:49 - The first roastery: no ventilation, visits from the fire department
0:40:29 - Pitching the coffee–uninvited–at a top French restaurant
0:46:48 - The trick to making a perfect espresso
0:53:30 - Todd takes a sabbatical: “I was suffering from my brain.”
0:57:40 - Expanding to more cafes and a shift from roasting to hosting
1:01:17 - An impasse with investors, and a bailout from Chobani’s founder
1:09:38 - Small Business Spotlight

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This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Sarah Sarasohn. Our audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to how I built this early and ad-free right now.
0:05.7	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:10.1	I heard this stat recently that really stuck with me.
0:14.0	Most businesses only use 20% of their data.
0:18.5	That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out. How can you
0:22.6	get the full story? And where's the other 80 percent of that data? It's trapped in emails,
0:28.9	buried in call logs and chat transcripts where businesses can't use it. That's where HubSpot
0:34.8	comes in. Their customer platform brings everything together so you can get the full story, because when you know more, you grow more.
0:44.3	Visit HubSpot.com to get started.
0:52.2	Hey everyone, and happy New Year. So this week we're running one of our favorite episodes. It's the story of La Cologne Coffee. And this episode is special because you'll hear a bit of an HIV-B-T crossover. When the company's investors wanted to take the brand in a different direction, La Cologne was saved by Hamdi Ulaikaa of Chabani, who was also a past
1:13.3	guest on the show. We first aired this episode back in 2020, and since then, the story has
1:18.9	kept evolving. Chabani has gone on to acquire La Cologne outright, and today you can find their
1:24.9	coffee, cold brew, and canned lattes in grocery stores all over the country.
1:29.9	Anyway, it's a great episode, and I hope you enjoy it.
1:37.3	We started the old investor discussions, and we landed on one.
1:42.6	We did the deal, and that lasted 52 days to the first
1:46.4	board meeting. I said, okay, I believe that cold brew is going to be a thing, and La Colom
1:51.9	needs to be the father of it. And they said, nah, we don't want to do that. What they wanted to
1:58.7	do? They wanted us to build 200 cafes.
2:01.8	So I just, I said, we're out of here.
2:04.7	We're going to buy you out.
2:11.6	Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
	...

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