Roaster of the Year: Macro Category Winner 2021—Tony’s Coffee
By Emily Puro
To mark the 50th anniversary of Tony’s Coffee in Bellingham, Washington, the company’s management team and staff have set a big, hairy, audacious goal for themselves. It’s not enough that they’re on track to be carbon neutral in their roasting and delivery operations this year. They’ve committed to offsetting the company’s entire historic carbon footprint by 2030.
Big, hairy, audacious goals—commonly known as BHAGs to Tony’s staff—aren’t new for the company. Every year for more than a decade, each employee has been asked to share one. What’s more, one of the first BHAGs CEO Todd Elliott remembers setting just came true—to earn the distinction of being named Roaster of the Year.
Coincidentally, the week before learning that Tony’s had been selected as Roast’s 2021 Macro Roaster of the Year, Elliott ordered Chinese food, and the message inside his fortune cookie read: “A long- term goal will soon be achieved.”
Not thinking too much about it, he crumpled the fortune and put it in the recycle bin. When Roast publisher Connie Blumhardt delivered the exciting news, he says, “I had to go dig it out and tape it back together, but I’ve got it.”
A Long and Winding Origin Story
Tony’s was founded in 1971, when Tony Campbell decided to roast coffee on an old nut roaster and sell it, along with spices and other staples, in Bellingham’s historic Fairhaven district. A few years later, he sold the business to two faculty members from nearby Western Washington University (WWU) who were looking for a new venture in retirement. They, in turn, sold the business to Elliott’s parents in the mid-1980s, but he had little interest in the family business at the time.
“When my parents moved to Bellingham, I was in college, then I went to law school,” Elliott recalls, “so I wasn’t really all that involved with the company.” It wasn’t until the early 1990s, after practicing law in the Bay Area for a couple years “and hating it,” he says, that he “hit the ejector button” from his law practice and began looking for a new career. He ended up buying a roasting company in the Bay Area called Vigal Coffee, which he ran for several years. In 2000, when Elliott’s parents began thinking about retirement, the family merged the two companies under the Tony’s Coffee name and, shortly thereafter, Elliott took over as CEO.
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