We’re in Charlotte, and Lake Norman, and Asheville. We’ll continue to expand in those markets, and soon we’ll be in Roswell, and then other places around Atlanta. We’ll be in South Carolina (looking at you, Charleston and Greenville), and in Virginia. We’ll expand the brand in the Triangle area, and keep working night and day to make sure each café experience is as unique and local to that neighborhood as it should be.

For us, however, the decision to kickstart out-of-state growth in Roswell had as much to do with identifying the right franchise partners as anything else. Summit is a family-friendly, community-first café business, and we need boots-on-the-ground partners to bring the Summit brand to life.

In a series of conversations a few falls ago, we agreed on two major things — Summit was going to grow, and we needed to remain true to what we’ve always stood for. And at the top of that list, jotted down upstairs at the roastery on some post-it notes, was “local.”

Summit Coffee today announces that it has signed three more Charlotte-area franchise partners. These three cafés add to the three Summit franchises announced earlier this year, plus Summit's five corporate-owned cafés, for 11 total retail stores open or in development.

The hope that sustains us is the belief that Summit can be the local coffee shop, time and time again. The hope is that the same way Summit makes someone in Davidson feel, the way a visit to our Asheville cafés makes someone feel, that’s the feeling we want to gather, bottle up, and recreate in new towns and cities.

The award this morning confirmed what we already knew. That when a global pandemic started to sweep through Davidson as it had the rest of the world, we were ready for it. We certainly weren’t ready logistically, and didn’t have a “plan” for what these last 8 weeks would look like. But we were ready for it in spirit.

But while we’re in the coffee business, we’re more so in the relationship business. The primary takeaway from spending seven days with these friends in Querocoto wasn’t how great the coffee was. It was how great the people were, how great they are, and how hard they work to produce coffee and ship it to a faraway world they’ll never dream to see.

It’s no secret that we want to grow Summit. At first, it was beyond one store. Then after we had two cafés in Davidson, it was beyond coffee shops … and then came the roastery. And then it was, outside of Lake Norman, and our beautiful retail space in Asheville was born. Expansion is happening, it’s inevitable, it’s exciting.

There is a big gap between the feeling when you finish second, or third -- as we have done handfuls of times -- and the feeling when you finish first. The feeling of winning, of putting yourself out there and competing with the best coffee roasters in the Southeast, and being named THE best. We've long aspired to win the prestigious Charleston Coffee Fest, and now we have, and it feels really good and really right.

Welcome to the new normal, where our pace of activity is outpaced maybe only by our ambition and ideas. It’s a thrilling time, to be honest, to be part of this team and part of this company. Ideas and energy from one department of the company generates both admiration and inspiration for the others.

Having fun is a value. As are our other eight statements -- being a good and fair employer, sharing our story, being sustainable. None of these should be targets we try to hit, but should be statements we vow to live out in how we approach our work every day.