Coffee Conversations: Biggby's Bob Fish on Challenging Corporate Coffee’s Status Quo

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.

Can you give me a bit of background on your philosophy when you first started Biggby in 1995?
I had had an enormous amount of success, putting myself through school, owning this restaurant and so on. I opened the cafe to an absolute resounding thud, and damn near went out of business. So my mindset in the beginning was, I hope I survive.

The first decade of the 30 years that I've been in the coffee shop business was absolutely survival mode. But if there's one thing that I like doing it’s building things, and so from a business perspective, I wasn't focused on much beyond survival and getting to the next step. I had no thought about the moral components of running a business.

I had read a book called “Megatrends” [from 1982 by John Naisbitt] that said Americans had more discretionary income, were coming back from more travel with higher taste expectations, and were willing to shift off of quantity and low price and into quality and high price. And that turned out to be true, because that was the birth of specialty coffee.

How were you sourcing coffee back then?
It was 100% a broker model. We were a retailer, we were never a roaster. And that was really influenced by my restaurant experience—if you’re McDonald’s, you don’t farm your own cattle, you don’t grow your own potatoes—so my thinking was, we’re going to be a retailer. Let’s be good at retailing.

So in the beginning we had some micro roasters that were out of Seattle, but by 1999 we were using a company called Paramount Coffee. I would establish the blends, the profile, and Paramount would pick up the phone, talk to a broker and say, What do you got, and at what price? And then they would buy it at the best possible price.

So what changed in your approach to business and to Biggby?
We get to 2014 and we're doing really well. We're past that decade of just making it: from 1995 to 2005 it was survival; from 2005 to 2014 things were generally going our way. We decided to franchise the concept when we had two units. Franchise doesn't really make you any money until you get to 20 to 50 units, and so by time we get to 2014 we're over 100 and getting to 200 and we're adding all these zeros to our paycheck, and we're becoming more and more disinterested in the business. There wasn’t really any personal challenge in it.

In 2014, we came across an individual and he introduced us to the concept of conscious capitalism or stakeholder business. You can articulate it many different ways, but basically it’s the rejection of Milton Friedman’s version of capitalism, which is shareholder supremacy and all other stakeholders must suffer in order to maximise the profit and the takings for the shareholder.

So we ended up changing the culture of our business, and it took about a decade. So I think it took from 2014 to about now, but we fully embraced the stakeholder model, where we began making decisions that were positive for all the stakeholders, whether that be the community, or the customer, or the employee, or the environment. 

How did that impact your coffee sourcing?
In 2018, I read in a white paper that coffee producers were walking off their farms, and I was like, “Holy shit. How could that be?” I mean, things are going [great] where we are, we're kicking ass and taking names. By 2018, we're getting to 300 [franchised] units, and I decided for the first time ever to visit a coffee farm and meet my first coffee producer. So I had been in the business for 23 years, I thought I knew everything about coffee. And as it turned out, all I knew was everything about lattes.

So I visited my first coffee farm with my wife, Michelle. When we landed, it became sort of self-evident why producers were walking off their farms. It was for two major reasons: One, the C market generally made pricing such that the producer was paid less than their cost of production over 80% of the time. You don't have to have an MBA to understand that you can't not make money forever and not be like, screw it. I'm moving to the city, or I'm migrating. Right? The other reason was that the consequences of climate change, or the ravages of climate change, were manifesting. Wet areas were becoming wetter, dry areas becoming drier, and increased pest and pestilence had become uncontrollable.

We came back from that and said, we're going to change our buying model. We're going to disavow the C market, and we're going to create a direct trade relationship. We call it farm direct, and the broad theory is we as the end user will buy directly from the producer, and will eliminate as many of the unnecessary hands in between. And we'll take the inevitable savings and push it down to the producer so that they can be economically viable and have the resources to combat climate change.

In 2018 we threw down the gauntlet and said, by 2028 we will—as a first goal—make Biggby Coffee 100% farm direct. We did that under a separate organisation that we call One Bigg Island in Space, and we are 50% of the way there.

When we’re done with this first goal, we want to move on and change how the industry purchases coffee, and move a higher percentage of it to a direct trade model, or one that decouples from the C market so you can't knowingly pay somebody less than what it costs them to produce their coffee. That is inhumane and immoral. But the coffee industry has really hidden behind a veil of, “It's complicated”, and I would suggest that it's not complicated, it's just difficult. And difficult is not enough of a reason to not do it.

What was the reaction of your franchisees to this new approach?
Franchisees are highly cost conscious, and they run the gamut of liberal to conservative to religious to secular. They're not a homogenous group of people. What I did initially is to make the business case as to why it would be a competitive advantage to use a direct trade model. We could have a guaranteed supply at a stable price, not meaning fixed, but more stable than the C market, which goes up and down in a matter of hours. How can you build a business model where your core product at the end of the day costs twice as much as it did at the beginning?

So that was step one, to make the business case. And step two was to create an emotional connection between the producer and the franchisee. They're very similar people. They both own their own businesses. They both take great risks. What you find, on a human level, is that everybody wants the same thing, which is food, shelter, clothing, safety, security, health, and something better for the next generation. And so if you can create that emotional connection and humanise it and provide the business case for it, there's some momentum there.

We do a presentation at Biggby Nation Summit every year, that’s a room full of 1,000 franchisees. We bring, at our expense, all the producers every year so they can get a standing ovation from those 1,000 franchisees. We call that full circle, because we go down to the farm and rummage around, and I think they have the right to see what we’re up to, visit our cafe, see where their coffee is sold and for how much.

How many producers do you work with currently?
We’ve been to 250 farms, but we only have five farm direct partnerships. This year we’re adding two more farms. Neither of their coffee has hit the supply chain yet, but will soon.

There’s a threshold of values alignment: Are you treating people right? Are you treating the planet right? Are you investing in your community? What we're interested in is building long term relationships with people, and it is a perpetual relationship.

What happens when you create a perpetual relationship is that that farm can then invest. Most producers don't know if they're going to sell their coffee, and if they do at what price, right? But when you have a long term relationship with somebody who shows up year after year, buying the same coffee at an agreed to price, you can actually begin to plan for the future and make long term investments in the farm.

Can you talk a little bit about the future of this model, once you get to 2028 and are 100% farm direct. What’s next?
In 2028, we will reset to a new goal. The first goal, and I'm single mindedly focused on it, is bringing Biggby to 100% farm direct. But what I'm doing is writing the white paper of how to do this at scale. We're not the first to do it, there's small cafes and roasters doing this at tens of thousands of pounds, but we're doing it at millions. And we're not doing what multinationals are doing, which is we do this with 5% of our product, and we talk about it 95% of the time.

So my wife and I want to jump from that to making some industry goals. So whether that is taking a look at the specialty coffee purchasing in the U.S. and assigning a percentage, and making that the next 10 year goal in terms of changing how people buy their coffee.

I have to say that a direct trade model is essential in building honest and real relationships with somebody on the other side. It cannot be facilitated by a third party. You, as an end user, have to have a relationship with the producer.