The short answer. Pete Leonard and two friends founded I Have a Bean in Wheaton, Illinois. The company was incorporated in 2007 as Second Chance Coffee Company, LLC. For nearly two years Pete roasted under the Second Chance name on a gas grill he converted into a rudimentary roasting machine while he built a new machine-learning coffee roaster. When that machine began roasting commercially in June 2009, the company was already doing business as I Have a Bean. Pete, Dave, and Ron started it after Pete's brother-in-law came home from prison and found that almost nobody would hire him. Today the company roasts coffee chosen from the top 1% in the world, and the people doing the roasting have been to prison. We call them post-prison people. You may know the term formerly incarcerated.
The longer answer starts with a man who didn't know where coffee came from.
2005: one cup in Brazil
In 2005 Pete was part of a mission trip to Brazil to help build part of a church. A coffee farmer there roasted his own beans over an open fire with the simplest equipment imaginable. The coffee he handed Pete was the best thing Pete had ever tasted. Pete has said that until that day he had no idea coffee roasting was something a person could do by hand.
He went home to Wheaton, where he ran a software company, and started buying green coffee. He turned his Weber grill into a roaster and kept adjusting it until the coffee coming off the grill was good. Soon it was so good that neighbors and people at his church began asking to buy it. Then one of them asked a simple question: "Are you ever going to do anything serious with this?"
A brother-in-law comes home
Just before that, Pete's brother-in-law Rick, who had been convicted of a felony and served a short sentence in prison, was coming home. Rick was a mathematician, an accountant, a programmer, and a database engineer. He had written software for Pete's company before his arrest, so when he was released, Pete hired him back.
Then the outside world weighed in. The company's payroll, health, and business insurance provider had a big problem with employing a convicted felon. This company threatened to cancel it all and blacklist him if Pete kept him on staff. The threat was too much. Rick stopped working at the company. Pete watched one of the most capable people he knew apply for job after job and get dismissed each time. A short stay in prison was turning into a lifetime of closed doors.
Within a few months, Pete and his friends decided that somebody should do something about that. The "that?" Build a company where a felony record was welcome at the door. Second Chance Coffee Company was born.
2007 to 2009: two ideas become one company
Second Chance Coffee Company, LLC was incorporated in June 2007 by Pete and two partners, Ron deVries and Dave Scavotto. The plan joined Pete's two preoccupations: roast coffee as good as that cup in Brazil, and staff the roasting plant with people coming out of prison.
Getting from paperwork to product took two years. With a lot of help from generous and smart friends like Drew and Greg, Pete designed and built the company's first commercial roaster, a fluid-bed machine-learning system that Drew named the BeanMaster 5000. All the while, Pete kept roasting on his grill under the Second Chance name. In June 2009 the company hired its first post-prison employee and began doing business as I Have a Bean, drawing inspiration from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. At the end of 2011 the two partners were bought out by another friend of Pete's, James Gallop, who was impressed with the coffee and loved the mission.
Jim S. was the first person hired at the roasting plant. He had spent nine and a half years in prison, where he was certified in auto mechanics. About a year later Jim was able to get hired as a mechanic at a large utility company, which is exactly how this is supposed to work.
Why the coffee has to be top 1%
Mission-first companies are primarily, but not always, not-for-profit entities. They live their mission and let that be the driver for generating revenue. Some incorporate making and selling items as part of job training for the clients they serve. The actual value of the product or service being produced or sold on behalf of the clients is not intrinsically linked to the mission. The all-too-often result is a product or service that doesn't quite measure up to real-world competition.
Pete built I Have a Bean on the opposite bet.
I Have a Bean buys raw green coffee that scores in the top 1% worldwide, 87 points or higher on the Specialty Coffee Association scale. Finding a coffee that meets the standard is rare. The company evaluates new coffees daily, rejecting more than 95% of them. Many people preemptively judge anyone who has been to prison to be in the bottom 1% of humanity, incapable of being or doing much of anything that could be considered "good." But when a customer tastes the best coffee they have ever had, their view of who is capable of doing what begins to shift. The delightful coffee in the cup just can't be argued with.
That is why I Have a Bean can never lower the standard.
That standard turned out to do an even more vital second job, one Pete never saw coming. Producing such high-quality coffee changes how the people roasting the coffee see themselves. Many of our employees arrive after years of experiencing, in a hundred different ways, what someone with a prison record is worth. Then a stranger takes a sip of something they made and calls it the best coffee they have ever had. Hear that often enough and you begin to revise your own opinion of what you are capable of. Pete has witnessed it happen again and again.
What the mission turned out to be
For the first several years, Pete described the mission as hiring people with felony records. That is what the company does, and I Have a Bean's very reason for existence is to be a second chance employer. It's embedded into the very fabric of the company. But over time Pete came to see that hiring justice-impacted people to roast coffee is what the company does, while its purpose runs deeper than providing employment for this overlooked and undervalued group. The purpose is to change public opinion of post-prison people.
That purpose explains the company's seemingly odd behavior. Anyone who walks into the roastery at 655 Childs St. gets a free cup of coffee, every day the doors are open, served by someone who has been to prison. Completely free to anyone. The coffee poured for walk-ins alone costs the company more than $50,000 each year, and that figure leaves out the gallons donated to fundraisers, teacher appreciation breakfasts, and the like. Why do they do that? It's both simple and genius. Changing someone's opinion about another is much more likely to happen in proximity. When you know someone, it's much harder to judge. Much harder to dismiss or hate. It's easy to hate or fear a label like FELON. It is much harder to fear the man who recognized you when you came in, served you a cup of coffee the way he knows you like it, and asked about your day. The regulars now include police officers, judges, bus drivers, moms, dads, students, and curious folks who see the big sign in the parkway that reads "FREE cuppa COFFEE."
Getting hired here takes more than a prison record. Every candidate is evaluated on five things.
- Honesty. Do they value the truth, and what shows it? How they tell their story, whether the facts line up, and whether they leave out the parts that would make them look worse.
- Dependability. Do they do what they say they are going to do? We start assessing with the first phone call.
- Agency. Have they taken charge of their own destiny and decided that the person they used to be no longer exists?
- Coachability. Do they actively seek to learn, and what evidence is there of that?
- Engagement. Did they look into the company before the interview, do they ask probing questions, and have they noticed anything about our process or our people along the way? A candidate who shows no curiosity about I Have a Bean shows no concern for its mission, and that settles it.
A new hire then works through an assessment period of two to three weeks before the job becomes permanent. After that the expectation is the same for everyone, whatever their history: the best you have, because the mission demands it and because post-prison people everywhere deserve that standard.
I Have a Bean today
More than 60 post-prison people have worked at I Have a Bean since 2009. In early 2022 the company installed a Loring S7 Nighthawk roaster, which tripled its capacity. The system uses software very similar to what powered the BeanMaster 5000. Orders placed by 11:00 AM on a weekday are roasted and shipped or delivered that day. Every bag holds a full 16 ounces and carries three handwritten things: the customer's name, the roast date, and the signature of the person who roasted it. Every pound sold funds 30 minutes of employment for a post-prison person.
I Have a Bean is a for-profit social enterprise. It is the fourth company Pete has founded, and he describes it as a Business as Mission. It takes no donations, and it pays its own way by selling coffee that people come back for.
Rick, whose homecoming started all of this, spent his years after prison as the technical mind behind the company. He handled early accounting duties, rebuilt its website, its sales system, and its roasting management software, integrating it all into one cohesive system. In 2024 he suffered a heart attack and passed away. I Have a Bean would not exist without him.
The company turns 20 in 2027.
Timeline
- 2005. Pete Leonard joins a mission trip to Brazil and tastes farm-roasted coffee. He begins roasting at home on a converted Weber grill.
- June 2007. Second Chance Coffee Company, LLC is incorporated in Wheaton, Illinois, by Pete Leonard, Ron deVries, and Dave Scavotto.
- 2007 to 2009. Pete roasts under the Second Chance name on his converted grill while building the BeanMaster 5000.
- June 2009. Commercial roasting begins on the BeanMaster 5000, the first post-prison employee is hired, and the company begins doing business as I Have a Bean.
- 2010. First local cafe partnership, with Java Connection in the Wheaton train station.
- End of 2011. The two founding partners are bought out by James Gallop.
- 2013. I Have a Bean is on the shelf in Chicago-area Whole Foods Market stores.
- 2017. 35 post-prison people hired to date.
- 2017. Seattle Pacific University produces "The Top 1%," a short film on the company's mission.
- Early 2022. Loring S7 Nighthawk roaster installed, tripling production capacity.
- 2023. The Global Leadership Network produces "The Day Everything Changed," a short film on the company's origin.
- 2026. More than 60 post-prison people hired to date.
- 2027. 20th anniversary.
See it for yourself
Stop by 655 Childs St. in Wheaton for a free cup, Monday through Friday 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM or Saturday 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM. Or order a bag and read the signature on it.