FairWave Appoints New CEO as Specialty Coffee Collective Swells to 14 Brands

If you’ve been paying attention to specialty coffee over the past few years, you’ve probably noticed a pattern: beloved indie roasters, one by one, joining forces under unfamiliar holding company names. The latest chapter in this story comes from Kansas City, where FairWave Specialty Coffee Collective just named Justin Seamonds as its new CEO — or, as the company puts it with a wink, its “Prime Minister of Fun.”

Seamonds takes the helm of a sprawling operation that barely existed five years ago. FairWave now counts 14 coffee and bakery brands, six production roasteries, and roughly 45 cafes across five distinct U.S. markets. The roster reads like a who’s who of regional specialty coffee: Minneapolis’s Spyhouse and Up Coffee Roasters, Milwaukee’s Anodyne and Fiddleheads, Maryland’s Ceremony Coffee Roasters, and North Carolina’s Black & White Coffee Roasters and Joe Van Gogh.

For specialty coffee drinkers who care about where their beans come from and who roasted them, this kind of consolidation raises questions. What happens to the character of your favorite local roaster when it joins a collective backed by private equity? Does the coffee stay the same, even if the ownership structure doesn’t?

From Kansas City to Coast

FairWave’s origin story starts in September 2020, when two of Kansas City’s most prominent coffee brands — The Roasterie and Messenger Coffee — merged under a new holding company backed by Great Range Capital, a local private equity firm. The idea wasn’t to blend the brands into one homogenous entity, but to let them operate independently while sharing resources behind the scenes.

“We do not want to see local brands of coffee disappear or be squashed down by national brands,” founding CEO Dan Trott said at the time.

The concept worked well enough that FairWave started shopping for more. Spyhouse, the Minneapolis roaster founded in 2000 that had grown to six cafes, joined in 2021. Milwaukee’s Anodyne followed in 2023. Then came Ceremony Coffee Roasters in October 2024 — the 22-year-old Maryland roaster founded by Vincent Iatesta, who’d taught himself to roast while studying international marketing in the ’90s and opened his first cafe in Annapolis.

The Ceremony deal was notable for marking FairWave’s first move outside the Midwest. “The essence of Ceremony will look and feel the same,” Iatesta said at the time, “the same warm cafes, friendly baristas and exceptional coffee, now backed by an even stronger support system.”

The North Carolina Push

2025 and 2026 have brought FairWave’s most aggressive expansion yet, with two North Carolina acquisitions in quick succession.

First came Black & White Coffee Roasters in Raleigh, the small-batch specialty roaster founded in 2017 by barista champions Kyle Ramage and Lem Butler. The duo had built a reputation on single-origin coffees with meticulous sourcing and a competition pedigree that few could match. Ramage stayed on to lead the company; Butler departed to pursue other projects in the specialty coffee world.

Then, in early February 2026, FairWave announced the acquisition of Joe Van Gogh Coffee, a Triangle institution since Robbie Roberts started roasting in Raleigh back in 1991. The company, named after a Dan Bern song, operates six cafes across Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, including a UNC campus location. Roberts is staying on, and the company’s sustainability focus — solar panels on the roastery roof, compostable packaging in the cafes — remains intact.

The New Boss

Seamonds brings a different background than you might expect for a specialty coffee CEO. He spent 2020 to 2025 running Roti, the Chicago-based fast-casual Mediterranean chain. Before that, he held multiple executive positions at Dean & DeLuca, the gourmet food retailer. It’s hospitality experience, certainly, but not coffee-specific.

His first priority, according to FairWave’s announcement, is a listening tour. “I’m planning to visit each market to understand each brand’s unique identity while strengthening our work together as a collective,” Seamonds said.

That phrasing captures both the promise and the tension of the FairWave model. The collective works only if the individual brands retain their distinctive characters. Spyhouse in Minneapolis shouldn’t feel like Ceremony in Annapolis, even if they share back-office systems and purchasing power.

Why This Keeps Happening

The specialty coffee industry is, in many ways, a victim of its own success. A generation of roasters who started in their 20s and 30s, building brands from scratch during the third-wave boom, are now in their 40s and 50s. They’ve put in the work, built something meaningful, and might be ready for a different chapter.

At the same time, running an independent roastery has gotten harder. Green coffee prices are near historic highs. Equipment costs keep climbing. Finding and retaining skilled staff is a constant challenge. The economics that worked a decade ago don’t always pencil out today.

A collective like FairWave offers a middle path. Founders can cash out — or at least de-risk — while staying involved in the business they built. The brand keeps its name, its cafes, its local identity. The new parent company handles the unglamorous work of HR systems, accounting, and supplier negotiations.

Whether that trade-off preserves what made these roasters special in the first place is the open question. Private equity has a mixed reputation in food and beverage, and not every acquisition story has a happy ending. But FairWave has been at this for five years now, and the brands in its portfolio are still operating, still roasting, still serving coffee.

What to Watch

Seamonds’s appointment signals that FairWave is thinking about its next phase of growth. The company has a dedicated webpage inviting coffee brands to “join the collective” — not exactly subtle about its intentions. With 14 brands across five markets, the obvious question is: who’s next?

For coffee drinkers, the day-to-day experience at your local FairWave-owned cafe probably won’t change much. The baristas are the same. The beans come from the same roastery. The menu stays familiar.

But behind the scenes, the specialty coffee map is being redrawn. The independent roasters that defined third-wave coffee in cities across America are increasingly finding themselves under larger umbrellas. FairWave isn’t the only player in this space, but it’s one of the most active. And with a new CEO and fresh capital backing, they’re just getting started.

The coffee in your cup might taste the same. The industry pouring it looks a little different every year.