Inside the new Kahwa Coffee headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida. Images courtesy of Kahwa Coffee.
After 20 years of bringing specialty coffee to Florida and beyond, Kahwa Coffee has entered a new era with a move into a 24,742-square-foot corporate and production headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The new facility in an industrial area of north-central St. Pete includes all of Kahwa’s roasting, grinding and bagging operations, and adds more than 10,000 square feet of space over the company’s previous headquarters, which it occupied for the past seven years.
The roastery includes Kahwa’s 60-kilogram Ambex machine plus a range of other existing production equipment, while adding a new bagging machine.
“We have pretty much doubled the capacity of bagging with that machine,” Kahwa Coffee co-founder and co-owner Raphael Perrier recently told Daily Coffee News.
Sourcing will also remain the same as it has been for the last two decades as Kahwa continues to work with New Jersey-based importer Royal New York, focusing in part on small cooperatives in Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala and elsewhere in Central and South America for its blends.
The new training center at Kahwa.
Kahwa’s primary sales channels include wholesale accounts with restaurants, cafes and hotels, company retail, e-commerce and franchising. Five franchise locations have opened since Kahwa launched the program in 2022.
Largo-based Pridgen Realty represented Kahwa in the lease transaction, while real estate firm Colliers represented landlord Legacy Capital Partners, based in Denver. The former post office building is part of Petersburg Commerce Center, a three-building industrial and manufacturing park.
Perrier said the process of finding the new location, arranging financing, moving equipment and renovating the space took about a year, yet the production roastery move required a quick pace.
“It took just three days to move everything, which was, as you can imagine, a challenge, because we had to keep going on the production side,” said Perrier.
Renovations included new flooring and paint, construction of a separation wall with windows between the production and office areas, installation of roll-up doors, propane infrastructure for roasting equipment, and the creation of a replica cafe that will be used for training and education.
Perrier and his wife, Sarah Perrier, founded Kahwa in 2006, and the company describes itself as the “largest independent coffee roaster” in Florida. Perrier said the company will soon grow even larger through new hires of office and production staff.
The company currently lists 21 cafes — 20 across Florida’s Gulf Coast and one in Fort Worth, Texas — and more than 800 wholesale customers.
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Daria Toptygina
Daria Toptygina is a freelance writer, avid coffee lover and social media manager of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine.
