The co-founder of the chain Biggby Coffee talks about building a successful company with hundreds of franchised locations, only to switch to a new way of doing business—one that prioritises more than just growth and profit.
This year’s Best of Panama coffee auction was the most expensive ever, and was once again dominated by the gesha variety that put Panamanian coffee on the map. Now, the country’s coffee association is seeking to brand and trademark its most valuable asset.
The co-founder of the chain Biggby Coffee talks about building a successful company with hundreds of franchised locations, only to switch to a new way of doing business—one that prioritises more than just growth and profit.
When I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2011, the first job I had before getting into coffee was at the Michigan Theater. A beautiful, historic movie palace that hosted world cinema, concerts, live events, and film festivals, it also served something called Biggby Coffee at the concession stand.
I had never heard of it, but Biggby was—and is—a cherished Michigan brand on par with Faygo or Better Made. While now found all across the country, Biggby was founded in the mid-90s in East Lansing by Bob Fish and Mary Roszel, who met while studying hospitality at Michigan State University. During and after college, the two worked at a pancake restaurant called the Flapjack Shack which they would eventually own.
That all changed in 1993, Fish tells me. “I saw a coffee shop show up called Espresso Royale. And I was like, ‘Hmm…’ I didn't think specialty coffee was possible. Starbucks had not even left Seattle yet. And I sort of decided on the spot that I was going to sell the restaurant and start a cafe”.
Fish and Roszel sold up and travelled to Seattle to do market research, before returning to Michigan to open their first location in 1995. Originally named “Beaner’s Coffee”, the pair, alongside Michael McFall, decided to franchise the company in 1998, growing to 77 locations by 2007.
(That year, the company announced it would change its name to Biggby due to “beaner” being an anti-Mexican slur. In a 2008 interview with The Grand Rapids Press, Fish said they weren’t aware of the term when they founded the company, but that they changed the name “because we felt it was the right thing to do. We are a company of inclusion not of exclusion”.)
There are now some 450 franchised Biggby stores in 13 states, and Fish is honest about their original focus on growth and business success above all else. “We were operating this business the way we thought it should be, which was, you know, screw everybody else, we’re just going to be takers here”, he says.
But that changed in 2014, and since then Fish has advocated a new way of running a large coffee company. Through a separate organisation, called One Bigg Island in Space, beginning in 2018 Fish and his wife Michelle began shifting Biggby’s coffee sourcing towards a direct trade model. It was a slow process—according to its most recent impact report, in 2019 Biggby sourced 1%, or 24,652 pounds of green coffee through this model. But by 2024, that had risen to nearly 1.3 million pounds—47% of the company’s coffee purchases.
By 2028, Fish says, they aim to be at 100%, and the next step is encouraging other big companies to join them. On LinkedIn, Fish is honest and sometimes acerbic in his criticism of the coffee industry's failings. "[I use] some very exotic and and maybe even sometimes inflammatory language on LinkedIn, because I am trying to rattle the cage a little bit and get people's attention," he says.
So how did this happen? I spoke with Fish about his change from a standard “screw everybody else” approach to one that prioritises relationships and the needs of farmers and the environment.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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