"Roaster of the Year" Coda Coffee grows to 40 employees

Transplants from Seattle, brothers Tommy and Tim Thwaites started Coda Coffee in Denver in 2005. It was just the two of them at first, which snowballed to four within a year. The company has about 40 employees today.

"We doubled our sales every year for three years in a row," says Tommy of the growth curve. The company continues to hire.

After numerous accolades in the last five years, Roast Magazine recently named Coda the "Macro Roaster of the Year" for 2014.

Coda roasts about 500,000 pounds a year, far above the cutoff for a micro-roastery, but still relatively small. "We were considered macro, but we're still micro," says Tommy. "We were competing with companies 10 to 15 times our size."

Coda Coffee is a certified B Corporation, and contributes to educational infrastructure and other projects in growing areas in Colombia and El Salvador, as well as providing excellent benefits to employees.

"Sustainability is a big piece of what we do," says Tommy. "That's probably the number-one reason we won [the Roaster of the Year] award."

Both Tommy and Tim have worked in the coffee business since the 1990s in Washington, Arizona and Colorado. WIth Coda, they buy directly from farms in 15 countries.

The company sells 15 kinds of coffee wholesale and has seven retail locations in metro Denver at Kaiser Permanente facilities and is opening two more, and also sells coffee at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona.