Couple’s Coffee Company Reaches Critical Mass

Leah and Ryan Connor, owners of Critical Mass Coffee. (Courtesy photo)

If you’re a busy couple with careers as a pharmacy executive and engineer to be exact, a toddler and a 4-year-old, what do you do with your precious spare time? Collapse from exhaustion? Nope. If you are Ryan and Leah Connor, you start a wholesale organic specialty coffee roasting company.

The couple launched Critical Mass Coffee in Manchester in 2018. Ryan works at Kinsmen Corporation in Hooksett and was part of the team that built a first-in-the-nation PFAS treatment system for the City of Portsmouth. Leah is director of pharmacy services at Capsule, an online, same-day-delivery pharmacy.

“Ryan and I are working these high-level, high-stress jobs and consuming large amounts of coffee. We were sick and tired of paying crazy prices for subpar coffee,” Leah says of their inspiration to start a coffee company. “Ryan is an entrepreneur at heart.… One night he says, ‘I bought a coffee roaster and we’re going to start roasting coffee.”

With that, they launched Critical Mass Coffee with Ryan serving as director of operations and Leah as director of marketing. “We built an ecommerce platform and roasted in the garage. It got to the point where we asked, ‘Are we going to do this in the garage or do it the right way?’” Leah says.

So, they rented and outfitted a space in Manchester and purchased a custom-built roaster that was delivered in March 2020, just as the pandemic hit. Despite that, the couple has grown Critical Mass Coffee to 15 employees, and they are currently acquiring two other roasteries as well as buying land to build a larger facility.

“The potential growth for a coffee company is tremendous. It’s a $100 billion market per year in the U.S. Starbucks is $15 billion a year. That leaves room for micro roasters,” Ryan says. He adds that he eventually plans to dedicate himself full time to growing the company, which will eventually include multiple microroasteries.

However, the couple will not sacrifice quality for growth. Their mission is to provide specialty grade, organic coffee while working with coffee growers worldwide who use ethical, sustainable farming practices. In fact, they only source fair trade, organic beans. “I want my coffee to taste really good, but I want to feel good when drinking coffee that it came from a really good farmer,” Leah says. The company now offers 10 coffees in its product line and ships nationwide and has even begun shipping internationally with customers in Norway, Sweden and Canada.

For more information, visit criticalmasscoffee.com.