Kaity and Gabe Gould’s path to coffee bean entrepreneurship is long ― in miles, if not in time. Owners of Fort Smith Coffee Co., the husband and wife’s dream of roasting, packaging, and brewing the finest beans from halfway across the globe, started Down Under and wound up in Fort Smith, Gabe’s hometown, where the venture has grown quickly.
“‘Why coffee?’ That definitely has a backstory,” Kaity says. “Gabe and I had lived in Sydney, Australia when we were first married. Gabe attended Hillsong International Leadership College, a theology and worship creative arts program. I started working as a barista and just really enjoyed seeing the community connections that happened over a cup of coffee. That’s when I decided to own a coffee shop one day.”
The idea was something of a moonshot, considering Gabe didn’t even like coffee back then, and the dream went onto the back burner for a few years. However, times, tastes, and addresses eventually changed, and once the couple relocated back to Fort Smith, they found the market lacked the kind of coffee they had come to crave while living abroad.
“We relocated here in spring 2013, and when we moved back, we wanted fresh roasted coffee,” Kaity explains. “We saw a huge need in the River Valley for that and wanted to fill that gap.”
The couple started modestly, roasting coffee in small batches as a glorified hobby, albeit a hobby that produced beans that developed a ravenous following at the local farmers market. Three years of growing a base led to the company’s first brick-and-mortar location, measuring more than 2,200 square feet, at 1101 Rogers Avenue, in May 2017.
In the summer of 2020, Fort Smith Coffee Co. opened a second location, a four-thousand-square-foot space in the downtown Bakery District, which expanded its roasting operations. Early last fall, the company opened a third spot, this time inside the U.S. Marshals Museum. The company employs a total of twenty people across all three sites.
Kaity notes that the company’s relatively rapid expansion hasn’t been without its learning curve. “Scaling the business has actually been, absolutely, the biggest challenge of this journey for us,” she says. “About a year after we opened at the Bakery District, a year spent navigating COVID restrictions and all of that stuff where surviving was thriving, we really started kicking off our wholesale business.
“We knew we had untapped potential to increase our production and expand into the wholesale sector. That required a separate permit because even though we do the coffee roasting inside our Bakery District location for our retail space, [wholesale] is considered a separate operation.”
The company’s wholesale coffee business has slowly started to gain some traction, and building revenue from business-to-business clients is a priority for 2025.
“We’re also doing a thing called white label, which is coffee we roast for other branding,” Gabe says. “A client will tell us they want this particular type of branding, and we will work with a designer to set that up for them, then put out coffee roasted to their specifications under a different label.”
Ramping up production to supply its growing retail and online operations, as well as moving into wholesale accounts, has meant investing in newer, larger equipment and expanding staff expertise. Both have been accomplished through the Bakery location, Kaity says, not to mention securing warehousing space outside the three public-facing locations.
“Moving into that wholesale sector, we did purchase a larger-capacity roaster,” Gabe says. “It is still very much small batch, but for us, a much larger capacity coffee roaster. The roaster that we have now can handle ten times as much coffee as we’re putting through it currently. We’re excited to ramp that up and maximize our equipment.
“We also have one head coffee roaster and another person or two in our roasting department to handle shipping, bagging, labeling, and so on. We’ve definitely fine-tuned our craft.”
Only certain regions of the world have the right soil and climate to grow coffee, none of which are located in the United States. This means that in addition to the unforeseen challenges that can come with any agricultural crop, there are potential political and trade issues to consider when importing it. But so far, so good, Gabe says; for all the challenges the company has faced to grow and expand, getting enough raw material hasn’t been one of them.
“There are some of those things happening in some of those countries, but we’ve never experienced a situation where we weren’t able to get coffee,” he says. “We kind of just rotate different origins in and out, depending on what’s available at the time.”
From the beginning, the company has been as picky about the quality of the food they serve as they have been about the beans they roast. Nearly everything ― right down to the flavored syrups and caramel sauce ― is made in-house, and the few things that aren’t are of the highest quality, such as sourcing bread from the local Harvest Moon Bakery and featuring the coveted Boar’s Head brand of meats.
“From day one, we have made almost everything from scratch,” Kaity says. “I do believe that sets us apart.”
The couple says they have no immediate plans for another location although they insist they never say never in order to stay open to as-yet unforeseen opportunities. Today, the couple’s focus lies in maintaining the quality and standards that got them here, from beverages to food to customer service, and carrying those elements that drive community-building into the wholesale side of the business.
“We have our three retail fronts, and we have a great general manager, Savannha Rodriguez, who is allowing us the opportunity to really focus on that B2B side,” Kaity shares. “We’re really looking forward to forming corporate partnerships where we can help businesses provide high-quality, fresh coffee to their employees. We’re excited about the partnerships we have and the potential to grow that even more.”
Fort Smith Coffee Co.
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