The FairWave Specialty Coffee Collective is growing their domain once again. The Kansas City, Missouri-based coffee conglomerate has expanded eastward this time, acquiring Baltimore’s Ceremony Coffee Roasters.
In the four years since KCMO’s Messenger Coffee and The Roasterie merged to form FairWave, the brand has experienced exponential growth-via-acquisition. After collecting a few coffee companies around Kansas and Missouri, FairWave made news in 2021 with the purchase of Minneapolis’s Spyhouse Coffee and then again two years later with Anodyne Coffee in Milwaukee (as well as KCMO’s Hugo Tea earlier this year).
Announced Monday, October 28th via press release, the acquisition of Ceremony marks the umbrella company’s first move outside of the larger Midwest region. The 22-year-old specialty coffee roaster with six cafes around Maryland is the 11th brand to join FairWave. As part of the acquisition, founder Vincent Iatesta “will continue to lead the Ceremony team,” and “at the same time, the leadership team will prepare for updated responsibilities at Ceremony and FairWave.”
As far as the customer experience goes, Iatesta states that not much will change. “The essence of Ceremony will look and feel the same, the same warm cafés, friendly baristas and exceptional coffee, now backed by an even stronger support system.” He goes on to say that much of the improvements will be behind the scenes. “As part of the Collective, we’ll begin to see the advantages of our new resources, systems and expertise infused into the quality of our work, spaces and culture.”
It’s an aggressive growth strategy for FairWave, and the expansion into a new region doesn’t give any indication it’s going to stop any time in the near future. You can go onto FairWave’s website right now and email them about acquiring your coffee brand; there’s a whole page dedicated to it. It’s certainly an attractive offer, and one that legacy specialty companies appear to be agreeable to. There is over 70 years of industry experience between Ceremony, Spyhouse, and Anodyne alone.
It’s all part of an industry growing into maturity. Many of these companies were started by folks in their 20s who are now in their 40s or 50s and looking for more stability. It’s not the romanticized notion of coffee shop as a passion project, but it is the reality of the coffee shop as a business. And the with full weight of private equity funding behind them, FairWave is making the offers few are able to refuse.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
