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A Seattle coffee roaster turned bottled cold brew, cafes, and in-house bakery into a multi-million-dollar regional brand.
figures stated in interview
The first wedge was not a cafe: it was bottled cold brew, a distinct product that won 300 grocery locations before the founders built their first shop.
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Jake and his business partner Mike were audio engineers who toured the world doing sound for bands until 2012, then started a coffee company in 2013 because touring was no longer what they wanted to do. Coffee was the constant on the road, so they began with cold brew: Mike had home-brewed beer, Jake made coffee, and they bottled it. They became the first Seattle-based company to bottle cold brew and reached about 300 grocery locations within the first year to year and a half. Production began in half of a garage, with a 2.5-kilo roaster operated at night while both founders still worked audio jobs. The company later raised money from music-industry contacts and opened cafes, a roastery, and a bakery. The founder reported annual revenue of $1.5–1.6 million for the roaster, $1.5 million for one cafe, $1.6–1.7 million for another, and about $800,000 for a marketplace location. Cafe profit was about 5%, despite the busy storefronts. The model became a vertically integrated local brand: roast, sell online and through grocery, serve customers in cafes, and produce pastries and syrups in-house.
For a bottled coffee brand, the first customers should be people already buying cold drinks repeatedly: independent cafes, neighborhood markets, and grocery buyers looking for a local product with a clear shelf story.
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Data credibility: The revenue, profit, cost, and savings figures are founder-reported in an UpFlip interview. They were not independently audited in the transcript. The video frames the company as a $6M/year business, but the quoted individual annual lines do not sum exactly to that headline, so this entry reports the specific line items as spoken.
The first revenue came from a simple physical product: cold brew brewed in small batches, bottled, and sold through grocery locations. That path let the founders sell before committing to a costly cafe buildout.
Anchorhead’s growth loop connected product, places, and production. Bottled cold brew created grocery distribution and brand awareness; cafes gave customers a daily reason to return and a place to try roasted coffee; the roastery supplied both wholesale and its own shops.
A cafe or packaged-food company has long stretches where the work is visible but the signal is noisy: opening-week traffic can drop, a neighborhood may not adopt a shop, and fixed costs keep arriving. Anchorhead’s founders kept multiple routes to customers alive.
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