Sapporo Coffee Kan

Sapporo Coffee Kan didn't start as a café at all — it opened in 1982 as a wholesale supplier of coffee and tea materials, and only became a specialty retailer in 1989, when it rebranded as 珠房サッポロ珁琴館 and began operating its own shops rather than only supplying other businesses. The roasting identity came a few years earlier still: the company installed charcoal roasting equipment in 1984 and began what it calls authentic charcoal-roasted coffee production, a method it has kept as its signature rather than switching to conventional drum roasting as it grew. That signature shows up in an unusual product: charcoal-roasted coffee yokan, a traditional Japanese sweet reworked with the company's own coffee. Sourcing runs on direct contracts rather than open-market buying — Brazil's Fazenda San Conrado in the Cerrado region, Ugandan beans, Indonesian coffee from Bali's highlands, and multiple Colombian regions are all named directly. The company is now headquartered in Ebetsu, just outside Sapporo, with shops spread across Sapporo's Tsukisamu, Kitamaruyama, Odori, Otani, Kotoni, Atsubetsu, and Hiragishi districts, and it relocated its roasting workshop into a historic building in 2022. More than forty years after the charcoal roasters first went in, that method — plus a genuinely unusual sweet built around it — is still what separates this chain from a standard Sapporo coffee retailer.