For more thirty years, Oak Park-based couple Craig and Kristi Ross spent their time traveling across the country as executives in the healthcare and finance industries respectively. But during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Christmas present for their middle daughter, Sydney, sparked a familial interest in coffee that inspired a change in direction.
The gift turned 25 of Chicago’s top-rated coffee houses featured in the Chicago Tribune into a scrapbook.
“Kristi, for Christmas, she cut out all 25 (coffee houses), made a little album of the 25 different best coffee houses,” Craig said. “So, I drove around … and bought a $10 gift card from each one of them.”
Sydney, now an entrepreneurship major at St. Louis University, went to all 25 shops and created a journal that rated each one. Not much later, in 2021, Kristi sold her finance business, tastytrade, to a London-based company. Craig exited the healthcare industry after an acquisition in the same year.
From there, the family set out to dissect the vast consumerism around the coffee industry and create a global impact across its realms. This initiative culminated in U3 Coffee, which is expected to open its brick-and-mortar shop in Forest Park by the end of the year.
“When you look at the meaning behind U3 Coffee, it’s about uniting our family,” Kristi said. “But we also have an external reason … which is uniting the world through coffee. That’s our mission, connecting the coffee entrepreneurs to the end customer and bridging that education gap.”
Occupying the Madison Street annex next to Parkway Dispensary, formerly Doc Ryan’s, the coffeehouse will feature a selection of specialty drinks and coffee beans provided by locally owned shops around the country.
They’ll offer pastries sourced from local bakeries, including Silverland Bakery and Twisted Cookie, with a commercial kitchen adding breakfast sandwiches and other hot items to the mix.
U3 will also connect to a rooftop space above the dispensary, which Craig and Kristi said they hope to use as an event space that could bring in extra business.
But the family’s initiative travels far beyond the house music and ever-present whir of the espresso machine.
According to data from the National Coffee Association, U.S. consumers spent nearly $110 billion on coffee in 2022, accounting for more than 8% of the value of the food service industry.
Both Craig and Kristi emphasized the importance of taking the breadth of such a massive market and making its intricacies more accessible among farmers, roasters and consumers alike.
In the years of opening their business, Craig and Kristi took an “origin trip” to Costa Rica, where they learned about how more than 40 pairs of hands touch a coffee bean from harvest to consumption. Coffee bean “pickers” migrate across hilly terrain from Nicaragua through Costa Rica, paid by the weight of the coffee plants they pick.
“The big coffee companies do really well … the people at the origin may not necessarily be benefitting to the same degree,” Craig said. “We want to be able to provide some level of education around sustainability, around the farmers, what it takes to get a coffee bean from origin to here to be consumed.”
U3 Coffee’s name is indicative of the business’ three “arms,” now fully operational online platforms that connect the business with pillars of the coffee industry across the globe. The U3 Coffee Exchange is an online store for other roasters to sell their beans; U3 Coffee Banks raises funds for coffee farmers and roasters in part by allowing customers to add a tip for farmers upon purchasing a beverage; and U3 Coffee Media features video interviews with coffee shop owners, roasters and farmers on their website.
Craig and Kristi also plan to collaborate with marketing and entrepreneurship classes at OPRF high school to give students an entryway into the business world by learning about coffee. Starting this year, they’ll also allow marketing students an inside look at the coffee business through their internship program, which is bringing in five students this summer.
“One of the initiatives behind that is … bringing those interns in and having them be part of building a business as well as understanding the impact you can have, right there, boots on the ground,” Kristi said.
Melissa Martinez is a business education teacher at OPRF, coordinating financial literacy, digital literacy and marketing courses. Martinez said she wants the OPRF marketing program to become a resource for the local community by giving her students experience creating campaigns for real-world clients.
Initially, Kristi spoke to three of Martinez’s financial literacy classes about her switch from finance to coffee, and what it was like starting her own business. Now, in spring 2025, Martinez’s marketing students will work in groups to devise competing advertising plans for U3 Coffee.
They’ll also take a field trip to the shop to learn about the coffee farming and roasting process. Kristi said she and Craig are hoping to enclose some of U3’s upstairs space to host these classes.
Martinez added that for her students, the project is a win-win. They’ll gain useful marketing exposure and research skills, as well as significant insight into industries like coffee that could inspire them to start their own businesses.
“These kids, with their experiences having grown with digital media all their lives, they provide really good consumer insight into these local businesses,” she said. “Coffee is a growing business. There’s so many opportunities in it. And it’s even more real — we can go see it.”
Whether it be through teaching groups of students about the anatomy of coffee beans or chatting with other local entrepreneurs over coffee, Craig and Kristi hope to use their business to further connect to an industry through which people often connect as humans.
“People do care,” Craig said. “People care about sustainability and others in the business. So we hope to be able to make something of that.”