Blue Bottle Coffee: How a struggling clarinet player used $15,000 in credit card debt to launch a $700 million brand

There are only two things James Freeman has ever really wanted to do: play the clarinet and make coffee.

Today, Freeman is best known as the founder of Blue Bottle Coffee, the premium coffee chain with the simple, yet stylish, blue logo that adorns more than 75 upscale cafes around the world where you can buy a roughly $5 drip coffee made from high-quality single-origin, freshly roasted artisanal beans. In 2017, Swiss food giant Nestle bought a majority stake in Freeman’s company in a deal that reportedly values Blue Bottle at more than $700 million.

But before Freeman was the founder of a company that is set to roast more than 2.6 million pounds of coffee beans this year, he was a struggling classical musician roasting his own fresh beans as a hobby.