It was 1993 when Founder and Co-owner Eric Resch established the very first Stone Creek Coffee cafe in Whitefish Bay in December of 1993. It was the same year that the founders of Alterra (now Colectivo) began roasting and selling coffee at a kiosk in Bayshore Mall. 

The cafe would serve the Whitefish Bay community for 27 years before closing in spring of 2021 and then (happily) reopening as a bigger, better Stone Creek Coffee + Kitchen just two years later in 2023. 

When the cafe closed, Resch released a statement. A portion read: “I am proud of the work we have done in the last 27 years, and I know that the cycles of life (or a café) are simply that, cycles. Everything we create in our business is iterative with the goal of making something even better tomorrow. Today we announce the closing of a café, but tomorrow something new rises up based on what we have learned. We march on resilient and ever-curious as we go.”

Resch is still at the helm of Stone Creek, alongside his wife and Co-owner, Melissa Perez and eight employee co-owners. He works with coffee every day. And – if you ask – he would say he’s still learning. In fact, he would be among the first to say that – in a world filled with coffee – Stone Creek is not only striving to learn, grow and provide the best-tasting coffee they can, they’re working to prove that a business can be both radically human and profitable at the same time.

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Marching onward

Marching onward, resilient and ever-curious, is – in some ways – a simple summary of the story of Stone Creek Coffee, which has grown to include 9 cafes in the Milwaukee area. Much has changed since 1993, including the coffee landscape, which is now much more extensive, showcasing a diversity of roasters.

Despite Stone Creek’s overall growth,  if you travel back to the coffee roaster’s beginnings, it was founded on a mission that has remained true to its original tenets while evolving to meet the needs of a changing world. 

Resch founded Stone Creek Coffee as a DBA under the official business name, Giri Corp. Giri is the name of the central tenet of bushido, the code of conduct for Japanese samurai. The tenet outlined a profound sense of duty, obligation and loyalty to fulfill one's responsibilities, uphold ethical standards and demonstrate genuine care and concern for others. In modern-day Japan, the foundations of giri are still relevant, emphasizing the importance of social harmony and the achievement of one’s obligations.  

“From those beginnings, there has been a sense of social responsibility and obligation to our employees, customers and suppliers,” says Drew Pond, Co-owner and Director of Development at Stone Creek. “From day one, Eric sought to create an environment where people could gather together, be themselves, create community and incite change. And, here we are, 30+ years later, still working every day to do those same things.”

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People first

“We’re not perfect,” Pond notes. “We’ve had a variety of failures over the years. But for us, it’s about learning from those failures. When I came to work in the corporate office at 26, I had a lot to learn. But, even now - ten years later – we are always learning and evolving.  Every day we have to deal with changes to the coffee market, changes to the economy and the needs of our customers and employees.” 

Pond notes that in 2019, various factors impacting employees – including the desire for a living wage, guaranteed benefits, adequate breaks and effective responsiveness to employee feedback – led to a union vote. Ultimately, the 200+ employees voted against unionization. But the conversation didn’t end with that vote. 

“For me, this was a moment of reckoning,” notes Pond. “Personally, I realized that I needed to rethink what I knew as a manager.  What employees want and need now is to have a voice and to be heard. I had to listen, not just ask for occasional feedback.”

In response, they worked to improve the overall culture and employment experience at Stone Creek. They implemented feedback channels and began holding regular workshops, quarterly meetings and tri-annual pan-performance reviews. They also began distributing twice-annual employee satisfaction surveys to guide decision-making at the management level. Pond says they’ve also made it a point to regularly evaluate salaries and benefits, which were revised to include wellness provisions like two weeks of sick time and two days of mental health time.

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“We use the phrase ‘Remarkable Care’,” says Pond. “We use it to describe how we approach our product, but it’s also how we approach our employees and the expectation for how we treat one another. For me what matters is the relationships that I have when I walk into a space. I want people to respect me… but, I don’t want the respect to be obligatory, I want to have earned it.”

Resch and Perez have also invited full-time employees who have invested in the company’s success to join them as co-owners. Pond is among eight employees who have joined Stone Creek as co-owners over the past nine years. That includes Amy Balestrieri, director of customer care; Harmony Krafttakacs, director of products and implementation; Annaliese Frailey, director of kitchens; Garrett McGowan, director of finance; Karen Strange, director of retail; Bryan Kraft, director of production and Jason Wautier, director of IT.

On the ground level, they’ve also given their employees a voice and role in creating the company’s public-facing initiatives.

“We have Pride Month coming up in June,” notes Pond as an example. “It’s an important month for our employees. Two years ago, we invited a committee of employees to get together to determine the ways we celebrate and the organizations we support. We’ve also made it a point to support other advocacy initiatives brought forward by employees.”

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Accountability

In line with their mission, Stone Creek became a Benefit Corporation in 2020 and were fully certified as a B-Corp with B Labs in early 2022.

“B-Corp certification allows for-profit companies to demonstrate their commitment to the highest standards of social, ethical, and environmental performance,” says Pond. “For us, that was about creating clear standards and accountability for ourselves in areas that impact our employees, community, customers and suppliers.

“It wasn’t about making money. People weren’t going to buy more coffee from us because we became a B-Corp. But we wanted to be held publicly accountable. Right now we have two areas of focus: coffee buying and employee pay and benefits. So, we’re concentrating on improving in those areas.” 

Pond notes that remaining a B-Corp requires recertification every three years, requiring a continual effort to monitor Stone Creek’s Operations, its commitment to employee wages and working conditions, customer satisfaction, supporting the local community and creating economic stability for its suppliers. 

Each year, Stone Creek produces an annual Impact Report which proves out the work they’re doing. Their current 2023 report is available online and a new report will be released in May of 2025.

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Sustainability

“Historically, Stone Creek has done very little to toot our horns,” says Pond. “But we do a great deal of work behind the scenes that we’re really proud of.”

That includes sourcing 94% of their café energy from local wind farms and leveraging local partnerships to implement a composting program. In 2021, they partnered with Compost Crusader to reduce the amount of waste produced by brewing coffee in their cafes. As a result, brewed coffee grounds are composted and repurposed to benefit the community and local gardens. Since its inception, they’ve diverted 150,000+ pounds of coffee waste from the landfill.

While just under 30% of their purchasing is made up of coffee, which is necessarily sourced from abroad, Stone Creek has also committed to sourcing locally whenever possible. Over 50% of their other purchases come from partners within 100 miles of their headquarters. In addition, they’ve taken steps to ensure that all apparel and merchandise sold in cafes meets ethical standards for social and environmental sustainability.

As a farm-to-cup specialty roaster, they work to create economic sustainability by purchasing as much coffee as possible with direct price commitments to their producers. This ensures that more money flows directly to small producers who depend on the income for their livelihood. Prioritizing multi-year partnerships for larger lots of coffee also ensures more sustainable arrangements that benefit the producers. Currently over 86% of their coffee is purchased through such partnerships.

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“When you say ‘sustainable business,’ people immediately think about recycling and composting,” says Pond. “And we are passionate and committed to our impact on the environment. But it’s about more than that. Sustainability is also a mechanism to ensure that Stone Creek can remain here beyond Eric [Resch]... beyond me.”

Pond admits that, in an industry that depends on global distribution, struggles with environmental impacts and labor exploitation, and operates on extremely low margins, creating a company that strives to be better every day can be tough.

“On this difficult journey to create sustainability, we make mistakes all the time,” admits Pond. “We’re better than we were years ago, and hopefully we’ll be even better tomorrow. But this is a journey.

“It’s easy to focus on the quality of our product and disregard the need to create a company with a great culture that cares about its employees, customers and suppliers. But that’s not how we want to operate.

"We want to run a company that’s constantly improving. We want it to be a place where people courageously and boldly speak up for the change that they want to see. We want to create sustainability for our business in an industry that simply wasn’t built to be sustainable.”