Why it belongs in ORBIS
La Colombe, "proudly roasted in Philadelphia," built its NYC cafés around the Draft Latte, its self-described "ridiculously frothy, coffee-forward" drink, now sold in seasonal versions like Pumpkin Spice and S'mores.
La Colombe traces back to a friendship formed at a grunge concert in Seattle in the 1980s, between Todd Carmichael and JP Iberti, who bonded over a shared frustration with the quality of coffee available in the US at the time. That conversation eventually became a business: in 1994 the two opened their first La Colombe cafe in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, built around premium roasting rather than the diner-style coffee dominant in America before the third-wave shift. The company grew from that single Philadelphia cafe into roughly thirty cafes and a large wholesale account base nationwide, expanding into New York and other cities while keeping its roasting operation Philadelphia-based. Its most visible innovation came in 2016, when Carmichael introduced a canned draft latte -- nitro-style, poured cold -- that became the company's signature retail product and one of the more widely copied formats in the ready-to-drink coffee category since. In 2015, Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya bought a stake in the company, and Chobani later acquired La Colombe outright for roughly $900 million, one of the larger acquisitions in the American specialty coffee industry. The Manhattan cafes carry that history forward: draft lattes on tap, sourced and roasted under the same Philadelphia operation Carmichael and Iberti started three decades ago.