When Colectivo Coffee sets out to build a new cafe, company president Scott Isabella says they keep one objective in mind. “We’ll bring our architects and designers and think about how we can make this not just a focal point for the neighborhood, but also integrated into the neighborhood,” Isabella said.
At 20 locations – 12 in and around Milwaukee, three in Madison and five in Chicago – spanning from dense city blocks to cozy neighborhood spots, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Milwaukeean who doesn’t consider Colectivo a chain. But at the same time, the coffee shops maintain a sort of paradoxical small business feel. You won’t find the drive-thrus, automated espresso machines, and the frozen foods you might find at a Starbucks or Dunkin. And there’s a loyalty from locals at each neighborhood spot, a passion from the workers – most of whom, after an intense three-year organizing and negotiating effort, now belong to the largest cafe union in the United States – and distinct stylings from one store to another, from the historic, vaulted-ceiling lakefront location in Milwaukee to the sleek, almost cantina-style shop in Chicago’s Logan Square, that make it distinct from your average chain.
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In 2023, Colectivo is celebrating its 30th anniversary, a major milestone for the company. After several expansions over the past decade, including its first ventures outside of Milwaukee into Madison and Chicago, Colectivo stands at an apex point of a chain that’s growing, while still attempting to hold onto a small, neighborhood feel.
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COLECTIVO COFFEE began in 1993 as Alterra Roasters, the brainchild of brothers Lincoln and Ward Fowler and their friend Paul Miller, three founders who remain on the company’s board to this day.
According to Miller, the name came from the Spanish word altura, meaning height – but another company in California was already using the same name. “So instead we created the word Alterra, a blend of Spanish and Latin – loosely translating to ‘of the earth,’” Miller said in a written statement to Milwaukee Magazine.
Armed with a vintage Probat roaster and a small warehouse basement space on Washington Street, the three began supplying fresh-roasted coffee beans to coffee shops like the bygone Gil’s Espresso Bongo Lounge and Fuel Cafe in Riverwest.
The coffeeshops that litter city streets today – internet-friendly gathering spaces that primarily serve coffee and pastries – were much rarer in the early ’90s, and the idea of a local roaster, especially in a mid-sized, Midwestern city like Milwaukee, was much more novel.
But, as Miller will tell you, Alterra popped up at just the right time. “Consumers in the early ’90s were becoming increasingly interested in an elevated coffee experience – it was perfect timing,” he said.
U.S. coffee culture began to pick up steam throughout the early ’90s, in large part because of the growth of Seattle-based coffee chain Starbucks. But it was arguably 1994, the same year Alterra opened its first kiosk in the Bayshore Mall, that it reached its apex point: that year, Starbucks opened its first drive-thru; the NBC smash hit “Friends” aired, featuring the iconic Central Perk as a gathering space for the Manhattan crew; and the first “Internet cafe” opened in Dallas, establishing coffee shops as a gathering and workspace in an increasingly digitally connected world.
According to a 1994 Journal Sentinel article, the number of coffeehouses in the Milwaukee area nearly doubled between 1993 and 1994 – and Alterra became the choice roaster for many of them.
While Starbucks may have far outsold your average local coffee shop at the time, as Temple University history professor Bryant Simon, who authored the 2010 book Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks, explains, consumer frustration with the growing monopoly Starbucks had on coffee might’ve helped to set the stage for Alterra’s success.
“You can think of Starbucks as ‘coffee middle school’ in some ways. I think it’s still the kind of place that introduces people – including a lot of teenagers, right? – to espresso-based drinks for coffee, to hanging out in coffee shops,” Simon says. “[Colectivo] speaks, in its own sort of complicated way, to the desire to consume something that isn’t national or global, but that is of Milwaukee, that will reinvest in Milwaukee, that kind of says something about the uniqueness of this place.”
As that appetite for local coffee shops grew, Alterra opened its first store in 1997. The three founders picked a long-overlooked storefront on Prospect Avenue that was previously an office supply distributor. The company moved its roasting operations to Prospect, too. Rather than keep the process behind the scenes, the founders embraced the industrial style of the space and laid their roasting operations out in plain sight of the cafe, adopting the slogan “see it made, have a cup.”
It was an immediate success. The Prospect cafe, still in business today, became a gathering space on the East Side. This paved the way for more shops across the city. By 2003, the company’s 10th anniversary, Alterra was operating five locations across malls and retail spaces, including the popular lakefront location, repurposed from Milwaukee’s historic 1888 River Flushing Tunnel Station, which opened in 2002.
Within the next decade, the company would see a whirlwind of change. In 2010, Alterra sold its naming rights to Mars’ Flavia brand for a still-undisclosed amount, and agreed to help the multinational company develop its flagship brand of coffee products. Despite popular misconception, Alterra itself wasn’t sold to Mars; Mars was only given the right to use the Alterra name and branding for their mass-produced products, enabling the company to sell itself as a small Midwestern business with humble, organic origins. The deal also helped Alterra, which remained owned by Miller and the Fowlers, to invest in expansion. “We are not going to grow on some global expansion plan,” co-founder Lincoln Fowler said in an interview with the Journal Sentinel at the time, claiming that despite the deal, Colectivo would remain locally owned and focused.
In 2013, Alterra opened its most significant expansion to date, 78 miles west in Madison – Capitol Square cafe marked the company’s first location outside of the Milwaukee metro area, and the first of three locations that would eventually open in Madison. That same year, it opened its 10th cafe – the second in Wauwatosa – cementing the brand’s chain status and growing its name recognition.
Then, in late July of 2013, the company made an unexpected change. Largely in an effort to distance itself from Mars amidst persistent beliefs that Mars owned and operated Alterra, the company renamed itself Colectivo Coffee, inspired by the colorful Argentinian buses of the same name. “We think this symbol is a great match for our brand and the collective experience we share through the products we make, the places we build, the communities we support, and the customers we serve,” the founders said in a statement.
The change came as a shock to many locals, especially as rumors circulated that Mars had directed the rebrand, or that the new name would spell out wider changes for the company. “In reality, nothing has changed except the name we call ourselves,” the founders said at the time. “We have never been more committed to improving our craft, building sustainable relationships with our community, and growing the company we spent the last 20 years building. We hope you continue to come along for the ride, support us when we do well, and remind us when we can improve.”
When Colectivo opened its first Chicago location in 2017 in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, president Scott Isabella says many within the company were worried about expanding to such a large market. “There’s a lot of competition in Chicago,” Isabella says. Since then, though, Colectivo’s made a name for itself in the city, landing a spot in Time Out’s 30 Best Coffee Shops in Chicago, and adding locations in Logan Square, Wicker Park, Andersonville and the suburb of Evanston.
“I think a lot of customers in Chicago think of us as their local coffee chain,” Isabella says. “Our success in Chicago gave us a lot of confidence that we’re a brand that can appeal to people outside of just Milwaukee and Wisconsin.”
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IN THE PAST THREE YEARS, the most significant changes from Colectivo didn’t come from the top down; they came from the workers. Between 2020 and 2023, spurred especially by concerns of employee safety during the early pandemic, Colectivo workers across all 20 locations in all three cities voted to form a union and negotiate a contract.
With assistance from the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers (Chapters 494 in Milwaukee and 1220 in Chicago), Colectivo workers organized to negotiate new terms for scheduling, holidays, pay, health care and more.
As John Jacobs, the business manager of IBEW Chapter 494 notes, Colectivo workers from across Milwaukee – a city with a strong and persistent union history – had discussed organizing before, but it was the pandemic that gave the issue newfound urgency. “When COVID hit, safety procedures were being called into question – or lack thereof,” Jacobs says. “It brought about discussions of the union again, even harder.”
Colectivo’s ownership was less than enthusiastic. In August of 2020, after workers began publicly organizing, the founders sent out a letter to employees urging them not to join a union, citing boilerplate anti-union concerns that the union would saddle both the company and employees with undue financial burdens during a tumultuous economic period, as well as “undermine what’s most special about Colectivo – our close and collaborative relationship with our co-workers.”
Jacobs notes that he – as well as many Colectivo employees – was surprised by Colectivo’s opposition to the union, having always perceived them as a progressive, pro-worker company. “So they were kind of thrown off when there was this pushback,” Jacobs says.
As unionization efforts ramped up, Colectivo also hired consultants from the Labor Relations Institute, a consulting firm that sought to convince organizers that unions were unnecessary. However, as John Jacobs recalls, that plan backfired. “Our ammunition for the folks was to go in that meeting, and be armed with the question of, ‘We know that you have a contract with the owners to come in here and talk to us. Why can’t we have a contract with the owners?’” Jacobs says. “And that pretty much silenced the conversation.”
In April of 2021, Colectivo workers held a vote to have union representation that ended in a 99-99 deadlock, with 16 votes being withheld due to eligibility concerns about mail-in voters who had resigned since voting. In August of that year, the NLRB certified the eligibility of seven challenged votes, all of which were in favor of unionization, tipping the final total to 106-99.
In March of 2022, the National Labor Relations Board formally certified the election results, definitively establishing the Colectivo Union. It made history as the largest cafe union in the country, according to the IBEW, with over 400 workers across barista, truck driver, bakery and warehouse roles.
While Colectivo management put up a fight with organizers prior to unionization, Jacobs says that once the union was ratified and contract negotiations began, there was a notable change.
“The first thing that the attorney said was, ‘I’m here to get this job done, get a contract negotiated so that everybody can move on both sides,” Jacobs says. “That was just a breath of fresh air.”
And while owners never responded to requests to meet with the union, Jacobs says his experiences working with the attorneys and human resources workers at Colectivo has reaffirmed for him that “good people” are at the heart of the company. “It’s like any new relationship, right? You’ve got to build that trust, and once you build that trust and see that there’s good, honest people involved on both sides, you win together,” Jacobs says. “Everything’s not sunshine and rainbows. You’re going to have your issues that, again, you’ve gotta work together on to fix them.”
After about nine months of negotiations, both parties came forward this June with a contract that provided changes for more transparent scheduling, paid holidays, wages, and paid time off and sick leave.
Isabella says Colectivo is now concerned with providing clear communication to present and incoming employees about the union and contract. “That’s been our focus of the last 90 days, it’s just been making sure we’ve taken our first contract and that we can implement it,” Isabella says. “We think we came to a fair agreement, and then these last 90 days have just been making everyone aware.”
Jacobs says that working with Colectivo workers to fight for the union has been an inspiring experience, affirming how important Colectivo’s workers are to the local community, and vice versa. “The community itself has been supportive from the very beginning,” Jacobs says. “When things got contentious, it was amazing to see some of the comments that were on Facebook, telling the owners, ‘Give them a fair contract.”
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AS COLECTIVO moves forward after 30 years, Isabella says the company is focused on the future. In his work studying Starbucks and coffee shops’ impact on American culture, Simon believes that coffeeshops are “a reflection of our values and who we are.” He says that Colectivo’s challenge in the coming years, as it expands its footprint in Chicago and other markets, is to maintain that local feeling.
“Local’s always good, right? People want a sense of their local community. But that’s the challenge for [Colectivo], now they’re almost so big that they’re not associated with one place but maybe broadly Midwestern values,” Simon says.
While it may be true that Colectivo’s expansion has made it into a broader Midwestern chain, Jacobs says that for being one of the biggest cafe unions in the country, he and his fellow organizers have always felt like it stayed local.
“That’s how employees felt, too. As big as it was, it still felt small,” Jacobs said.
