Five years after launching a small coffee roastery with his wife, Tony Anderson insists his core business remains the same.
Anderson, owner of Three Story Coffee in Jefferson City, at times struggles to rattle off all the segments of his company. One of the biggest is a growing niche market selling coffee to churches.
"I have this core conviction that the local church should have the second-best cup of coffee in town behind mine," Anderson said. "If they knew the whole story and were given a choice, I would hope they would choose a better coffee."
For Anderson, the story of coffee drove him and his wife to start the business in fall 2012. Now, Anderson still strives to educate his customers about where their coffee comes from and the plight of coffee farmers around the world.
As business booms and Anderson expands, though, he's unsure what the company's next step will be.
Anderson and his wife, Sarah, started Three Story Coffee as a modest roastery in 2012. Leading up to the Great Recession, Anderson spent eight years working in Texas for a high-end real estate firm. When the housing market crashed, Anderson moved back to Jefferson City.
His pastor in Texas suggested he look at doing something with coffee. So for three years, while Anderson worked for the Missouri Department of Agriculture, he studied the coffee business in his free time. Anderson wanted to open a regular coffee shop serving mochas, lattes and regular cups of joe. The pieces never fit, and he never found the right location.
So he approached the idea from the other end.
"The more I tried putting those pieces together, the more they weren't coming together," Anderson said. "We decided to flip it and just work on roasting."
Often coffee farmers grow the cherries coffee beans come from in some of the poorest countries in the world. Farmers often receive just cents on the pound for coffee they sell. The Andersons built their business on a model where they buy coffee beans directly from small farmers in parts of Central America and Africa.
From the start, Anderson wanted to forge a business that educates consumers about where their coffee comes from and can help lift farmers out of poverty.
"I've always known a big part of what we were going to have to do and have to focus on was educating people," Anderson said. "We want to tell the story about coffee and where it comes from because that's how you start to change people's perception."
At the end of August 2012, the Andersons began roasting out of a shop at 122 E. Dunklin St. Curious residents often dropped by, wanting to buy cups of coffee. Anderson began serving drinks in the space to educate more consumers.
In 2015, the couple opened a second location in The Millbottom at 400 W. Main St. That location reaches people who go to the state Capitol, and Anderson wanted the focus there to be only on serving drinks. In December 2017, Three Story Coffee opened a third location at 1241 W. Stadium Blvd. inside the main building at the Jefferson City Medical Group offices.
Still, Anderson insists roasting remains the company's core business. Year by year, Three Story Coffee's roasting business has increased 50-100 percent, Anderson said.
Last spring, Three Story Coffee opened a new roasting facility in a building once used to manufacture blinds. Before the move, Anderson had 50 coffee bags stashed in the Dunklin Street shop, bags stored with a friend in Arkansas and even in Kansas City.
"We had coffee bags stacked everywhere we could find a place to put coffee," he said.
Three Story Coffee's new roastery has the modest character of the company's other buildings. From outside, the gray brick exterior looks like nothing. On the first level of the interior sits an empty foyer that leads to an office.
The real reason Anderson bought the building sits down a set of steep wooden stairs, where Anderson's original orange roaster and a new teal infrared roaster sit diagonal to each other. On one side of the room is a makeshift assembly line for bags of coffee that will be sold at the company's shop or shipped to customers across the country.
Moving into the new roastery enabled Three Story Coffee to expand its wholesale sales to coffee shops like Brew House Coffee in Jefferson City, Brew Brothers Coffee in Eldon and a coffee shop in West Plains.
As he ponders how best to grow the business, Anderson arrived at one easy answer: open more coffee shops. To do that probably means straying beyond city limits.
"Obviously, to open more shops, we've got to start moving outside Jeff City," Anderson said. "But that changes everything."
Selling coffee to other shops could continue to grow the business, Anderson thinks. Churches in cities like Phoenix and Seattle now drink Three Story Coffee from coast to coast. Anderson arrived on churches because most churches get cheap coffee without thinking about the humans who grow the beans.
"For most churches, it's a budget item," Anderson said. "If most churches knew where their coffee was coming from, they would be appalled."
For now, Anderson plans to keep telling customers the story of coffee. He hopes eventually to do something with the empty foyer in the roastery, like holding classes that teach people about coffee.
"We'll do something with it," Anderson said.