Doug Zell and Emily Mange moved from San Francisco to Chicago and could not find freshly roasted coffee they liked, so they wrote a business plan for a café and roaster in Lakeview. It opened on 9 October 1995 and roasted in the shop on a Probat L12. Intelligentsia now roasts at its Chicago Roasting Works in Bedford Park and serves tens of thousands of customers a day through its coffeebars, In Season subscriptions, grocery stores across the country and the restaurants, hotels and cafés that pour it as their house coffee.

Direct Trade is how Intelligentsia buys all of its coffee, not only its microlots. It built the model by travelling to the communities where its coffees are grown, and some partnerships, in Rwanda, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, date from 2003. A charter sets out five principles, from working with people who share its focus on quality to leaving a mark on the communities where it buys. Intelligentsia buys five grades of coffee from its partners and pays more as quality rises, selling the best lots as single origins and the rest in blends. In 2009 it created the Extraordinary Coffee Workshop for its partners, since held in eight countries, and since a smallholder edition began in 2020 the share of coffee it buys from smallholders has risen by 25%. It contributes to World Coffee Research for every pound it buys, backs the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide at Emory University, and in 2024 bought 20% of its coffee certified organic.

The Broadway Coffeebar is in Lakeview, where the first café opened, and Chicago also has coffeebars in the Monadnock Building and on Millennium Park, both in the Loop. In the Los Angeles area there are coffeebars in Santa Monica, Pasadena, Hollywood, Venice and Silver Lake; in and around Boston, in Watertown and on Post Office Square; in New York, at the High Line Hotel in Chelsea; and one in Austin. In Seoul there are four, in Seochon, Myeongdong, Lotte World Mall in Jamsil and the Shinsegae department store in Gangnam.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Intelligentsia Coffee